


Little White Lies

by Karracaz, MaryStacy



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Star Trek: TOS, Vulcan, Vulcan Biology, Vulcan Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karracaz/pseuds/Karracaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryStacy/pseuds/MaryStacy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is by L.L. Macleod.   A young Spock has to interpret the little white lies told to him by his parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little White Lies

**Author's Note:**

> In Memory
> 
> "Dusty Jones, writer, editor of LIAPITA (Logic is a Pain in the Ass) and True Vulcan Confessions. Affectionately known as Commodore Hotel to the August Party set, and one of the original co-chairs of the August Party. Worked alongside Mary Stacy and Mark Lenard Sarek at cons for juvenile diabetes. Died in 2003 from cancer.'[1]  
> Author of Sellout (a Krepe Paper) which appeared in True Vulcan Confessions  
> Under the name of L.L. MacLeod she wrote Little White Lies, Too Long A Frost and A Vulcan Tea Party which appeared in True Vulcan Confessions and LIAPITA

by L.L. Macleod

Taken From True Vulcan Confessions.

o0o

One

o0o

The new student sat between Spock and Noiard. She was almost fourteen. Very tall for her age, and came from somewhere in the desert provinces north of Shikar This was her first day and she did not have a uniform.

“Don’t let it concern you,” Noiard told her, leaning close and whispering. “It’s not a test. It’s a scientific experiment.”

Noiard wasn’t reprimanded for whispering. New students were always seated between Spock and Noiard because they ahd the best English and because Noiard was clever at making people feel welcome. The new girl nodded and picked up her stylus and went back to work without her fist grinding into her cheek and making a yellow mark on her face.

“It’s time to stop now. Please put down your stylii.”

Noiard nudged the new girl and whispered in Vulcan what the ser had ordered in English. Spock set his stylus in the rack and folded his hands.

“Sepek...”

Spock glanced back and saw Sepek hurriedly put his stylus down and sit back in his chair.

“Yes, ser.”

It was almost time for class to be over but this was only first English session. Father was coming home today and the day was like a broody rock chicken and wouldn’t move. Mother was impatient, too. He could tell by the way she didn’t stay at her desk and by the way she hurried everyone out of the room when it was time for the next lesson. Father was probably bringing her a present, too.

“Oh, you’ll like the ser Amanda,” Noiard was telling the new girl out in the corridor. “In our second lesson, we talk to each other and play word games and pretend that we’re asking directions to an inn or ordering food in a restaurant. Once, Sepek asked for a plate of bread and cheese with an unsanctioned child on it.”

“It was a ‘cheese sandwich with mustard’, “ Sepek said in defense. “It was an easy mistake, wasn’t it, Spock?”

Sepek was his friend now that his cousin Penon was T’Penon and went to preparatory school and wasn’t around to help with Sepek’s English lessons. Now that she was fourteen and had been robed, she only associated with older girls and considered he and Sepek nothing more than little pests. Sepek often invited Spock over to his house and so they both had a lot of opportunity to be ignored by T’Penon and her acquaintances.

Spock agreed out loud with Sepek that his mistake about the sandwich had not been a difficult one to make. He only wished that people didn’t think the story was amusing enough to tell it to every new student. There were people who called him an unsanctioned child.

o0o

At the break, Mother told him that she was going leave right after the second English lesson and go home early instead of working at the school until it came time for him to leave. She seemed anxious to go home. Mother had wanted to go with Father . Then the three-day trip had been extended twice and they hadn’t seen him for thirteen days.

But when father went out of town without them, he always came back with presents. This time he’d promised an entire boxful of mixed components form the factory outside T’Lempa because he said that children’s project kits were too limiting. Mother would get copies of books that couldn’t be found in ShiKar and something to wear that Father picked out and that Mother would say was too conservative. Father would say ‘Dignity, my wife. We must maintain dignity,’ which, for some reason, would make Mother laugh.

When classes were over, Sepek asked if he wanted to go back to his house with him but Spock turned him down. “I can’t, Sepek. My father’s coming home today,” he called over his shoulder and hurried out of the school yard as fast as he could without seeming lacking in restraint. Father wouldn’t stand for that. He was halfway home when he heard someone call his name from behind. A few jas away was h’daarin Sias, his father’s junior diplomatic aide. When Spock saw him, he waited for the aide to catch up.

“Good day to you, young Spock.”

“Good day, h’daarin.”

“Are you on your way home?”

“Yes, h’daarin. My father is coming home today.”

“That’s the reason I’m going there. If you would allow me to walk with you.”

Spock enjoyed Sias’ company. He had been working for Father ever since Spock was a baby and had even helped to take care of him during Federation Council meetings when Sias’ mother had the job. Sias would sit down and talk with him just as if they were the same age and would tell him things about when he was a baby - but only to him and never in front of his school-mates. Father once told him that Sias displayed the proper attitude and measure of respect towards Mother - and that he would do well to emulate him.

First, he had asked Mother what emulate meant, and then he had asked Sias about it. Sias had told him; ‘Always be respectful of her and concern yourself with her needs. Watch to see what it is that amuses her and then remind her of it. When others are listening, always speak formally. But when you talk to her within the household, never use the casual form of address unless the intimate won’t express.’

Sias was right. Father had begun to let Spock accompany him to the javelin fields after that because he was so impressed with his behavior. Sias knew a lot of things about pleasing Father, and he was one of the few Vulcans who could make Mother laugh.

 

Mother had dumped her things on the entry table and run out of her sandals. There was one of them in the middle of the floor near the door and another that had landed with its toe on the wall and its heel caught in the groove between the tiles. Father always scolded Mother about leaving her clothes around the house where they could prove a hazard or, in the very least, a nuisance to other members of the family. But she’d only tease him about his ‘excessive neatness’ and laugh at his dignified response. On one laughed at Father except Mother, and somehow it was not an insult when she did it. It was a game. And even if he didn’t always understand the joke of it, it was pleasant to be around them when they played it.

Spock dropped his tape case on the table and closed the door.

“Sarek?”

“No, it’s me, Mother... and h’daarin Sias.”

She came into the hallway and her faced looked puzzled.

“Isn’t Father home yet?”

“He wasn’t here when I got in but his luggage was. I guess he had to run down to his office for something” Then her face smiled broadly at him. “I think you might find something in your room if you look.”

The presents! He excused himself and made a quick path to the back of the house. He knew what one of them would be, but there was to be a surprise if he had been well-behaved in Father’s absence. Up until the last five days he was away, jFather called Mother every night for a report and Spock had eavesdropped long enough to hear Mother telling Father how much of a help he had been.

o0o

 

There were six different packages in his room! Six! He tore into them and found clothes and tapes as well as the components he’d been promised. He would inventory all the components to see just what he had to work with, and then he’d get his project book...

No, he’d better put the other gifts away first. Father insisted on orderliness. He gathered up his new robes and inched open the wardrobe with his foot, finding a long cloth bag with darker fastening straps standing against the mahirs rack just inside the door. He couldn’t believe it! It couldn’t be!

The Javelins were red and blue with fine silver wrappings near the heads and silver caps on the butts. Real javelins! His very own.

Two halves joined with a satiny twist and seemed to meld into one piece. He took them apart again and piled one full set of weights into the hollow space in the barrel and then ran the two sections together again and hefted it to his shoulder. He aimed at the tapestry...

“Not in my house, young man.”

He nearly dropped the javelin on his toes. Quickly, he lowered the butt to the ground and fell into the attitude of respect in the way the javelin teams did when the trainer came down the line. He saw his father nod and start toward him. Without a word, Father took the javelin and hefted it, shaking his head.

“A bit overweighted, I would say.”

“I was just testing it, Father.”

“We shall have to give them a good test, then, and soon, at the athletic field, now that you are a young man of ten.”

The field? With his own javelins and not rented like all of the other children his age? Spock understood. Father had been away on his birthday and this was his way of making amends.

He felt a warm hand alight on his shoulder and stay. He couldn’t help but shiver at the strangeness of it but he remained absolutely still so that it would not move.

“What do you say to that, my son?”

The hand touched his neck and moved to his face.

“Yes, Father. When can we go?

“On the usual day.”

Spock looked up into his father’s eyes and was surprised when he saw that they were very soft and moist-looking. They made him ache at the same time they made him want to stay. This must be what Mother saw when she said that Father had beautiful eyes.

“Is your other home?”

“Yes, Father. She was looking for you.”

Father tapped his cheek and then left Spock there in his bedroom with an odd sensation all over his body. His chest felt heavy. He took a deep breath to clear it and finally all of his muscles came loose and relaxed Mother mustn’t have told him anything about the computer lubricant all over the kitchen floor.

Spock put his gifts away, all except the javelins. Lying there across his bed, it made him think of a chief getting ready for battle. Father wouldn’t like t hear about that though. He heard talking from the direction of the lounge and realized that the grown people were probably having brew or tea before dinner. Maybe father would take them out to Elsrhed Inn to eat. Maybe Sias would go, too.

Spock looked once more at his javelins lying crosswise on his bed and then headed for the lounge. Father was just going in as Spock closed his bedroom door. He stopped for a second, he could still feel the imprint of Father’s hand on his shoulder. He’d better hurry. Once Father and Sias started talking politics, he and Mother wouldn’t get a word spoken between them.

“What are you doing here?”

Father was already inside but he had left the door open. Spock could hear what he was saying.

“You have no business interfering with my family! Leave here immediately!”

A moment later Sias appeared at the door with Mother right behind him. :Sias, please...”

“No, I should go. I will call later.”

“You will not call this house...”

“Sarek...”

“...and you will not speak with him.”

Spock froze. What was happening? He had never heard Father speak so impatiently to anyone, especially Mother. Even as far away as he was, Spock could see the look on his mother’s face. She was as surprised as he was. Sias only looked uncomfortable.

“I told you to leave.”

“Yes, of course,” Sias backed down the hallway toward the front of the house. “I will see myself out.”

Mother stared at Father for a moment then started to go the way Sias had gone. Father caught her by the arm. “Where are you going?”

Mother tugged until she pulled free. “I’m going to apologize for you, and I hope to God he’ll accept it.”

A second before Father turned his way, Spock flattened himself into the alcove where the mirror was and held his breath and tightened his shields as Father stalked by. Even so, it made him wince to feel the hardness and burn with the still-warm memory of Father’s hand on his face. At least no one knew that he had seen or heard what had happened.

As soon as Father was gone, Spock slipped into his own room. He put the javelins away ina corner of his wardrobe, removing each of the weights, slipping them into their sack and then wrapping the javelins themselves in their case.

o0o

 

He unpacked his lesson tapes. What had Sias done” Spock had known Father to order people from the house before, usually because they had been disrespectful of Mother. But Sias would never be disrespectful of Mother. He was always careful of her and had her trust. Before he’d left, Father had asked Sias to be available to assist Mother in any way he could while Father was gone. And Sias had done as he’d asked. Didn’t Father know that?

“For one thing, he is closer to you in age!” Father’s voice was so loud it seemed to be coming from the next room.

“For God’s sake, Sarek, don’t be silly. The only way we would have more in common would be to have shared the same experiences. Sias and I grew up on two different planets, for God’s sake!”

There was more shouting from Father in a tone that made Spock tremble. Father never spoke loudly unless it was to attract somebody’s attention at a distance. He said it wasn’t necessary to raise one’s voice to command respect. Why was he shouting now?

“I don’t want him near you. I will not have it.”

“You won’t have it?” Now Mother’s voice was sharp. “Since when do you tell me who my friends are? My God, Sarek, what is wrong with you?”

Spock was relieved when they got quieter and he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He wondered when dinner would be. He could make something for himself if he really wanted to, but the more he thought abut it, the more he knew that he actually wasn’t very hungry.

Spock loaded a tape into the viewer and began reading his philosophy lesson. He was concentrating so hard that someone had been knocking on his door for some time before he realized it. He hoped it wasn’t Father. “Come in.”

It was Mother with a dinner tray. “I bought you something to eat, dear.” 

She set the tray down on his desk. She waited until he unfolded his napkin and then sat on the edge of his bed. Was she going to stay and watch while he ate?

“You didn’t come to the lounge for tea when Sias was here,” she siad. Spock took up his spoon and sipped at this soup. It tasted instant.

“Father had left some gifts for me. Some clothes and some computer components, and a pair of javelins...”

“Spock...”

Mother rarely interrupted people so he knew he had not been clever enough to fool her.

“Spock, how much did you hear of what went on just a little while ago?”

He wished he could lie. Outworlders could lie and no one would care - least of all themselves. If he lied, he would disgrace himself and his family even if no one caught him at it. And Mother would catch him at it.

“I heard Father tell h’daarin Sias to leave the house,” he told her and then reached for his leafroll. It was the wave-treated kind you just had to warm up.

Mother was watching him. Manners required you to stop eating and assume the attitude of respect when you were being questioned by elders. But with other, you ignored manners and did precisely what she told you to do. And she had told him to eat.

“Is that all?”

“No, Mother.” He had hoped to avoid this by keeping silent. Father had taught him that keeping one’s own counsel was not lying and could serve one well in all manner of situations. This was one situation where it was obviously not going to work. “I also heard Father quarrelling with you.”

Mother took a breath and held it in. Was she as uneasy about Father’s outburst as he was?

Mother used to make Spock share his feelings with her. She didn’t anymore. But this time, he thought that what Father had said had made Mother uncomfortable.

“I wish you hadn’t heard your father - but I want you to know that it wasn’t his fault. He’s ...he’s just not himself right now. You may have to go to school without me tomorrow and take my instructions to the seresa.”

“Yes, Mother.” He had a thought. “Does he have a fever?”

Fevers could make people do strange things. Spock had suffered one once and it made him delirious and Father had put him in a cold tub to cool him off. He had thrashed about and cried for his mother but no one had blamed him for it or thought badly of him. Father had even brought him a pile of books and other things to amuse himself with while he was still in bed but almost himself again.

Mother’s bright Terran eyes blinked at him as if she was surprised.

“Yes...that’s what it is. A fever...” She said quietly before she told him to finish his dinner and left him alone.

o0o

Father didn’t come to breakfast in the morning although Spock heard Mother taking him to the bathing room a few minutes before she came to get him out of bed.

“Is Father better?” he asked over his markah.

“No, dear. I’m afraid not. I think I’ll be home with him today.”

He had thought that Father would feel better after a long night’s sleep but Mother looked like she hadn't shut her eyes all night. 

“I have some things I want you to take to the seresa with a note,” she said putting too much sugar into her team. “Take them right in when you get to school before you go to stand with your team. Okay?”

Before he could answer, there was a crash out in the hall and Mother was out of her chiar. He followed her and they foundFather standing in front of the closet where they kept cleaning things Half of the closet was on his feet.

“Sarek, what are you doing?”

His head turned toward them as if on a stalk of uda, slow and grating.

“I.. am doing...things.”

“No, you’re not.” Mother went to him and took his hand. “You’re going back to your bed.”

She backed him out of the debris and tightened the belt on his robe. As she turned him around, he caught sight of Spock standing there at the door.

“That is... that is...” He put a hand on Mother’s chest. “...your son...”

“Yes, dear. Now come on...back to bed.”

She tried to move him but he wouldn’t cooperate. He turned to stare at Spock as if he didn’t recognize him. “That is...he is...”

He turned eyes to Mother again and moved his hand from her chest to his. “That is...my son... my son with you...”

“Yes, dear. Now come on...back to bed.”

“But I want to look at him.”

“No, you don’t.” Mother’s voice got sharp, but not like she was angry but like she meant to be obeyed. “You go to your bed.”

Father seemed to know it too, because he moved in the direction she pushed him.

“Spock,” Mother said, looking back, “the things I told you about are on the vronsin table. You go on and finish your breakfast.”

Father glanced back over his shoulder at Spock as Mother led him away. His eyes were softer and moister than they had been the day before and they made Spock ache that much more.

“..that’s our boy...”

“Yes, yes, dear...”

It was wasteful, but Spock went back to the table and threw his breakfast away before he gathered his things and Mother’s and left for school.

o0o

Everyone wanted to know where the ser Amanda was. Spock told them that his father was sick and so she was taking care of him.

“Can’t someone else in the household stay with him?”

“There isn’t anybody except Mother and me,” he told the new girl and se thought that was strange. Sometimes, it was true, Grandfather came over when someone had a fever and made everyone else stay away. He would bring his lyre with him and play music for you until you fell asleep with a cold cloth on your head Then when you woke up, he made you eat soup, even if you didn’t want it.

Grandfather wold probably come to take care of Father tomorrow so that Mother could come back to school. Maybe Father would be better in the morning and wouldn’t need anyone to stay with him.

At break, the usual group got together but no one could argue over who got to bring the ser her food. They all sat on the door platform and ate without saying very much that was interesting. Finally Noiard said, “let’s play ‘Rhymes’ “ and they played it later in second English lesson, too, with the seresa in charge.

Spock thought that the day would never end. When it was almost over, Sepek asked him if he’d like t come home with him after school but he turned him down in case Mother needed his help. Father didn’t like to be sick and sometimes he had to be watched to keep him from getting up from bed and going about his usual duties.

Just as they were leaving the last lesson, a messenger from the white division came in and told Spock that he was to see the seresa before he left school. Sepek cornered him outside the classroom and demanded to know what trouble he had gotten himself into wihtout Sepek’s help.

“I don’t know, Sepek. I didn’t do anything.”

“Don’t be illogical, Sepek,” Noiard said, shouldering her tape case and pushing past them into the hall, “he’s probably just got another award.”

It wasn’t another award. Spock knew that when he got inside the seresa’s office.

“Come sit here, child,” she said to him and patted the space beside her on the sofa. He broke the attitude of respect and did what he was told although he thought it was very strange for him to do it.

“Your mother, the ser, called me a short time ago and asked That I give you a message. You know of course, that your father is not feeling well.”

“Yes, Seresa.”

“Good. The message is that you are not to go home today, but are to go directly to the household of your father’s mother and are to stay there for the night.”

“Is it contagious then, Seresa?”

The headmaster shook her head in a way that made him think she thought the idea amusing. What was amusing about someone having a fever?

“I very much doubt it, child.” She shook her head and looked away from him. “That I very much doubt.”

 

Two:

 

No one would tell him anything. Everyone was kind to him - Aunt Dor-hu went on and on with her stories, and dai-uncle Lu-ki quizzed him endlessly on his studies and praised him after - but no one would talk about how sick Father was. Spock wasn’t allowed to go hime the next day or the next, or even the day after that. And he didn’t see his Mother either. Why couldn’t she speak with him? The seresa had said that Father wasn’t contagious; why couldn’t someone else sit with him for awhile? And every day when he got home from school, Grandfather would shoo him off to change out of his school uniform and then off to his studies without even a word about Father.

 

There was only one other child in the household, his cousin Mi-tan who had just been robed. There also was cousin Hu-por who was the same age as Mother and wasn’t married yet, but he had a lot of duties around the house that kept him busy when Grandfather wasn’t reminding him to do them. Hu-por was easy to talk to because he had no opinions that lasted beyond the immediate conversation and would just as easily change them in the name of peace.

Mi-tan on the other hand, was what Mother called ‘moody’. Vulcans wouldn’t say that, but that was what he seemed to Spock, too. Mother also said that Mi-tan got his moodiness from his mother, Aunt Dor-mi. Aunt Dor-mi didn’t exactly approve of Mother. It wasn’t that she thought badly of Mother, but she seemed to think that Father should have another wife and beMotherer’s living companion Nobody on Vulcan had made them married anyway, she said. But Father and Mother had gold rings on their fingers and a certificate that said that they weren’t allowed to marry other people. And once a year, they gave each other presents from a special list in a book they had. This year Father was having h’daarin Wat-fafa make Mother a very fancy robe all in lace, but it was a secret and he wasn’t supposed to tell.

While he was staying at Grandfather’s, Spock had a music lesson every day. All of the rhythm challenges and difficult runs on his lyre forced him to concentrate so hard that there were times that he forgot completely that Father was so sick. Grandfather was suddenly so strict with him that he thought perhaps that it was all on purpose.

Spock remembered how Father had looked in the hall that morning and his stomach got hard just thinking of it. Was it really only some common fever?

Even Mountain scratch fever could be cured wit an injection, and no one was very concerned about that. But Aunt Dor-hu kept saying to Aunt Dor-mi when she thought nobody else was listening that she was concerned of Mother being over there in the house all alone with Father.

One day at music lesson, he decided that if there was something terribly wrong with his father that he should be told. When Grandfather came into the lounge with the music scores, Spock gripped his lyre, took a deep breath, and asked. “Grandfather, is my father very ill?”

“No. Of course not.” But his eyes weren’t so reassuring. “It is nothing that time cannot cure.”

Then came a pat on the side of his face that he never would’ve gotten if anyone else had been watching. “Come now, Spock. You spoke of a short tune you had composed for me.”

o0o

He wanted to go home. It wasn’t that Grandfather was unfriendly to him or wished him gone, but he had this thought that wold not fade that, if he could just go home, everything would be back to normal with Father well, and Mother happy the way it had been before. And the longer he stayed away, the worse he was afraid Father would become until no one could help him anymore. This thought haunted and chilled him every day he was gone until the morning came when Aunt Dor-hu caught him before he left for school.

“Now you can go right home after school, Spock. Amandaikan,” she told him, “and not bother to stop here at all. Or you may come for dinner if you wish, only you should tell your cousin Hu-por so that he may prepare something that pleases you or you may find yourself with nothing to eat for your dinner.”

Spock asked Aunt Dor-hu if she knew for certain that his father was well because he remembered that once you got her talking she wouldn’t be able to keep anything to herself. But Aunt Dor-mi came in then and told him to hurry along or he would be late for school. She walked out through the garden with him, her medikit in her hand, and stopped him just at the gate.

“You go directly home today, Spock Amandaikan. I will see that your things are brought to your house later today.”

“Yes, Aunt.”

Aunt Dor-mi was like Father; you didn’t argue with her or try to sway her thinking or dodge her commands. The best thing was just to do what she told you to without question or there would be long, weary lectures. 

The gate swung shut and banged into the latch. Spock shifted his tape case and started off.

“Spock...”

“Yes, Aunt?”

“...you would do well when you return home not to ask too many questions. Is that understood?”

Spock nodded and stood with his eyes down until he heard his aunt’s footsteps retreating. As soon as she was gone, he spun around and was off in the opposite direction even if it did mean that he had to double back around the drive.

When School was over, Spock disobeyed his aunt. He wandered down into the park zone and watched people come and go instead of going directly home. He didn’t know whether h e really wanted to go home now. The truth in his thoughts was that he didn’t want to see Father. Not in the way he had been before Spock went to Grandfather’s.

And no one had said that Father was better, only that Spock could go home. Father was always the same, always the one you could depend upon - unchangeable, unshakeable. Seeing Father confused and dim made Spock... the word he was thinking was an emotion and he discarded it. It was unsettling - that’s what it was.

He had tarried too long. Mother would worry if he didn’t come home soon. Remembering how Father had been to Sias the other day made him shoulder his tape case and hurry.

 

The house was very quiet. The air stirred sluggishly in front of him as he walked, almost as if no one had moved in it for days. It felt as if nobody was home.

 

He couldn’t find anyone. Someone had pounded javelins into the target in the garden until there was nothing left of it. It was a brand new target. Who would do such a thing?

He crept through the halls, tape case against his chest and his history assignment in his hand until he came to the room where Mother’s bed was. He stood there listening, breath still, hand lifted to knock but never striking. What if Father had gotten worse? What if....

 

The door slid open and shot a freezing bolt through Spock’s heart.

“It’s you dear.” She walked him away from the door and stood with him near the mirror alcove. He remembered the last time he had been there, shrinking back from Father’s burn on the day he had thrown Sias out. He wondered if Sias had been fired and if they’d ever see him again. “How have you been dear? Has your grandfather been taking good care of you?”

She stood a jas away from him, squeezing her hands together in front of her. She used to touch him all the time even when she didn’t have to; she didn’t do that anymore, even when she wanted to.

“Yes, Mother. I’ve been well. But Father...”

 

“He’s doing better, “she said. She squeezed her hands together even tighter. “I told him you were coming home tonight. He wants to see you. Will you go in to him?”

Spock nodded, even as he was thinking, what will I say to him?

Mother walked him to the door and stopped him just outside. She turned him toward her and placed her hands on his shoulders.

“Your father’s been very sick, dear, “ she said, leaning close enough for him to know that she was not wearing the perfume she always wore and that he liked so much. She smelled like she had just come from the scrub bar. “He might not look or act the way you remember, but please don’t let him know you notice.”

It was like walking into a caveberry bower where the air was dark and heavy and even a little wet. It was strange how anything could grow in a place like that, but once you got past the thorns, the berries were wonderfully sweet.

A strange man lay inFather’s bed wearing one of Father’s sleeping robes. There was a strange smell in the room. “Father?”

“Spock.” He sounded so tired. “Son, come here.”

He did exactly as he was told. He walked to the edge of the bed and stood looking down. The strange man had dark hollows for eyes with tiny red beads in them that gleamed in the flames from the idol on the far wall. It was the only light in the room. Even the draperies were drawn.

“How have you been, son?” It was a simple question but he didn’t know what to say at first. It was Father who had been sick, not him. It really was Father.

“I’ve been well, Father.” Spock wanted to say something to him, about how he wished he would feel better soon and how good it was to be back home, but the words wouldn’t come out. He shifted his report and gripped it tighter.

“What do you have there?” A weak moving hand lifted from the blanket and scraped against the report cover in Spock’s fingers.

“It’s my essay, Father. From school.”

Father reached out for it but his hand didn’t look strong enough even to lift itself. “‘Essay assignment. Spok A-mandaikan (kun-uitorAshn), Level 4...’”

Father stopped reading and rubbed his eyes before he started again. He stopped and rubbed his eyes two more times as if even the dim light from the idol hurt them.

“Would you like me to read to you, Father?”

He nodded, handing the essay back to Spock and settled bak into his cushions. Spock angled the print out toward the firepot. He didn’t like Father being sick. It made his stomach feel round and hard. “Begin.”

And he did. Several times. Father kept stopping him to ask questions. “They printed it?”

“It’s for display, Father.”

Excellent. Please begin again.”

Twice Father asked which class the essay was for and once more about the display. “Start again at the beginning, please.”

This time he got further along, nearly halfway before he noticed that Father’s eyelids had dropped nearly to closing. “Father?”

He thought the name for nearly a gajn before he spoke it out loud. When his father didn’t stir, e thought that maybe he should go.

“What...”

“I could come back later when you’re feeling better.”

“I am sorry...”

“Father...”

“....I am truly sorry....”

It was the eyes that startled him, that moved him to call for his mother and to stand back while she went to him.

“Sarek...Sarek, you need to lie down now and try to relax.”

 

She had come so quickly that he wondered whether she had been waiting in the hallway.

“...he is your son...”

 

“Yes, yes...”

“...my son with you...”

 

“Please, Sarek...”

 

Father let himself be pushed into his cushions and covered over with a blanket, but the words kept coming over and over: “..I’m sorry...my son...so sorry...”

 

Spock left when Mother said to. Her voice had been like a key unlocking his legs because before she had spoken, he couldn’t move. He went to his bedroom and sat idle on his bed with his tape case in his hands. Something was missing. He had left his essay in there...with Father.

 

He couldn’t go back and get it. He wouldn’t! Father was...he knew it wasn’t possible, even if he was sick, but when Father had looked at him just before he left, the way his eyes looked and the way he kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, “ over and over again, Spock couldn’t help thinking that his father had been about to cry.

O0o

Then, in the morning, Father was better. Mother was talking on the visicom while she made breakfast. Spock didn’t want to be impolite and interrupt her so he stood quietly at the door.

“...he had a hard time of it last night. He insists upon maintaining an intellectual perspective but it only confuses him in the end. I really think it’s the aftermath that’s the worst for him ... the embarrassment, the regret.. if only he’d come home when he was supposed to, it would never have gotten this bad.”

“That is Sarek as he has ever been...infallible even if it kills him.”

That was Grandfather’s voice on the visicom. 

Mother sighed and shook her head, “I suppose I really shouldn’t be talking to you about tis...”

“Please, Amanda - “ Grandfather used the courtesy words, too, even when he spoke in Vulcan. “I am no young gentleman with delicate sensibilities. I am sire of three and a ‘travelling man’ at that. I will not declare embarrassment of the subject - I am much too old and knowledgeable.”

Mother almost laughed at that. Spock could make no sense out of the conversation at all, but this was an opportunity to announce his presence. “Good morning, Mother.”

“Oh, here’s Spock.” She turned ot him. “Good morning, dear. There’s some markah on the table. Help yourself.”

Spock sat down. He wasn’t very hungry. Mother sat down with him after she got offwith Grandfather and didn’t coax him to eat. She seemed too tired. He felt tired, too, even though he hadn’t had to take care of Father all week. He asked if Father was well yet.

“I don’t know, dear. I was going to check on him later after you’d gone to school.”

“I hope he’s better today,” Spock admitted, pushing at a glob of markah with his spoon. “Last night he looked - “

Mother’s eyes caught his when he glanced up. They were sad. 

He knew that emotion well on her face. “...well, not like Father at all. I don’t like him that way. And I don’t think he likes being that way wither.”

“You are quite correct.”

He and Mother nearly bumped heads when they jumped.

“Sarek!”

“Good morning, Amanda. Spock.”

Father walked to the table slowly as if it hurt him to do so but as if being out of bed made up for it. “Please, Amanda. Sit down. There is no need to see to me. I am quite myself this morning.”

His eyes were still dark around the edges and his face looked as if it were being pulled back behind his ears, but his voice was more like Father’s usually was... the words, if not the firmness. He gestured for Spock to sit down, too.

“Can you take food yet, dear?”

Father shook his head but he reached out and lay his hand on Mother’s and took his usual chair. They always ate breakfast at the cutting table in the kitchen, but Father looked like he would feel more comfortable in his couch in the dining lunge. Mother turned her hand up and wrapped her fingers around Father’s. 

“How ‘bout some tea?”

“No, thank you. Some water -”

“I’ll get it.” Spock called the srvitor and ordered a glass - icy cold. “Here, father.”

“Thank you, son.”

He delivered the eater to Father’s hand; even Mother noticed how it shook.

“Please, Sarek, have some tea at least.” She pushed her cup in its saucer toward him. “Your blood sugar must be down in your toes by now. Please, just a sip.”

When Mother talked like that - with lots of pleases and with tears in her voice, it made it seem cruel not to oblige her. Father took Mother’s teacup in both of his hands and drank once from it He had a lump in his throat that moved up and down when he ate. Spock touched his own throat; it looked painful just for Father to swallow.

“Okay?”

Father nodded and passed the cup back. While he drank his water, he asked to be filled in on any and all happenings in the family since his illness. He listened, nodding, taking Mother’s hand again and not letting go.

“Want another sip?”

After a pause, Father agreed and took another swallow of mother’s tea.

“Why don’t you finish it, dear? I’ll make another cup for me.”

“No, I’ll - “

She gently pushed his hands away, shaking her head, “Go on.”

Father finished the tea and had another cup when it was ready. Spock felt hungry all of a sudden.

“What is that you are eating, my son?”

“Markah, Father.”

“Is it instant?”

“No, Mother made it.”

 

Spock saw his mother’s expression.

“Would you like some, jFather?”

“Just a taste.”

 

After the markah, Father had a taste of Mother’s glazed fruit and a taste of Spock’s juice and a taste of everything else on the table until he had tasted both of their plates clean and then asked, “Is there any more?” She pretended to be displeased with Father, but all the way to school until they reached the drilling yard, Mother wore her smile.

o0o 

Three

That was the end of Father’s illness. Mother made him stay home one more day but then he went back to work. Spock understood the seriousness of his father’s fever when people remarked but not when they thought he or Father could hear, how quickly Father had recovered and how efficiently he had returned to his duties. They certainly didn’t know Father very well or they wouldn’t have been surprised.

 

At school, everyone was pleased to have the ser Amanda back. Or nearly everyone. The new girl didn’t care one way or the other. She had grown partial to the seresa. It had been interesting to have the headmaster supervise their class, but it did wear thin hearing about sand-sledding at every lesson.

And Mother had a new idea. She wanted to have a garden party for English class at their house and invite the parents. Everyone was to bring something to eat.

“Can we invite our cousins, Ser?”

“I think we should draft a list by the end of the week of the names of people that we could like to see as guests,” Mother told them. “Also, my husband and I have several friends and acquaintances herein the city who come from other planets, and I thought we might invite them, too, so that we all could talk to other members of the Federation and see how their lives differ from ours.”

“Will the t’yetma be invited?”

Spock thought that his mother might laugh at that but she didn’t. She had a way of making you think that she was going to be indiscreet and then remain perfectly sooth.

“Yes, of course. The t’yetma Sarek will be at the party and will assist in the planning.”

“The t’yetma Sarek always assists the ser Amanda,” Noiard offered, “because he is her husband.”

It was true, but why did Noiard have to be the one to say?

Father did help, though. He called people and made arrangements, and he was much more agreeable now and didn’t seem to mind it when people made mistakes or performed in an unsatisfactory manner. He took the tickets to a show that he had been waiting weeks to see and gave them to Sias so that he and Mother could go together. He and Spock stayed home and set up the new javelin target and said nothing about the one they carried out to the trash.

Hublas was the day that he and Father went to the javelin fields to practice their distance hurls. They wore half-robes and tunics with one arm out and, for the first time ever, Spock didn’t have to sign in and out on the rental ledger.

Before he would let him hurl, though, Father made him warm up. Father always insisted on warming up, but today it seemed to take longer with his new javelins sitting on the rack. Then after their muscles were warm and limber, he had to wait again while Father weighted his javelins for him.

“Heft this.”

Spock took the javelin and mounted it to his shoulder the way he had seen the champions do it, trying not to show the least exertion, but Father took it back anyway and took out some of the weights. He tried to tell him that it really wasn’t too heavy but Father always knew best about these things and wouldn’t listen to any argument.

Wen he finally let him hurl, Spock mounted the javelin to his shoulder, puffed out his chest with air, lifted and drew, then shot his arm forward with all his might like a bolt of rare lightning. The Javelin flew a whole six -and -a -half jas and dug its spear into the dirt.

After what felt like at least fifty or sixty years, Spock heard a breath go out of his Father’s chest and the sound of his second javelin being weighted up He didn’t want to throw again. He wanted to run out and retrieve the first one and crawl into the wrapping with it.

“Here,” said Father, and Spock felt the pole in his hands, ‘take your second.” Hands touched his shoulders lightly and urged him back into place. “And relax, son. You are trying much too hard.”

Father was right. He always was. His next hurl went straight and three times farther and didn’t dig straight in. He took big breaths before his second pair and the last of them landed flat on the shaft.

It was Father’s turn. He stood in the parabola marked on the ground and hefted his javelin to his shoulder. They were very heavy, Father’s javelins. He knew this from being allowed on the field during some of the competitions as a bearer. This was because Father had over-mass upper body strength. That meant that Father’s arms were stronger than some of the Forest Clan men who were bigger and bulkier than he was. He could even crack pili nuts in his hands. 

Father’s first hurl was bad. It landed slightly down-spear and in the first turn, but he never let anything like that deter him. He hefted his second time and it went into the end of the third turn where many of Father’s javelins usually went.

Spock didn’t do as well as he would have liked. He’d imagined himself stepping up to the pad, hefting one of his new javelins - full-weighted as if it weighed no more than a careless thought - and hurling it so far into the end of the second turn that everyone was asking after him. “Only ten years of age? I have seen youths of fourteen hurl less competently.”

Well, ten-point-one - almost. He didn’t think he would mind that really - people talking about him if it were something like javelins and that Father would be proud of him for. But he really didn’t do any better than he usually did, maybe just a little worse. He thought the new javelins would have helped.

H’daar T’Iaba came into the field. She was a champion in javelins and often attended the same day as he and Father.

Spock felt a palm on his back. “You are doing well, son. You must expect a slight setback until you have become accustomed to your new javelins.”

He looked up at his father, squinting against the bright sun behind him. “Is this customary,  
Father?”

Father explained to him then how, even using inferior equipment, one becomes used to the heft and the handle of a javelin, unconsciously accommodating to any irregularity in the grip or in the dispersion of its weight. When one began to use a new set,new accommodations had to be made. That was why his progress in javelins had not been able to move ahead sufficiently as long as he was forced to use a different set every time he went to the field. And that was why Father had bought the javelins for him - so that he could improve his skill at the pace his ability allowed.

He and Father had to step back while h’daar T’Iaba stepped up to make her pair. She threw far and smooth and landed in the brightly sanded area at the boundary between the third and fourth turns. Her second hurl brought her just outside it.

“Shor kirpa, h’daar.”

H’daar T’Iaba turned to them while the retrievers shot out, dipped neatly down to scoop up the javelins, then skimmed back to the pad where they released them into the racks. She nodded to Spock and his father and made polite greeting. Father was nearly as good as she was, but he would never go up for competition.

o0o

That night was Mother’s mind technique lesson. She took them with the seresa’s husband, the ilisor, at the seresa’s house in exchange for English lessons. When Father came to tell him that he was on his way to pick up Mother, Spock asked if he could go along.

“Have yo finished your lessons?”

“Yes, and more besides.”

“Very well. Hurry to the cloak cupboard. I hear the limousine.”

The seresa lived near the school in a big house with a woven rush wall around it. The family was a big one - and old - and occupied the house from vronsin to watchtower, not like at home where many of the rooms stood empty. The children had a large room all to themselves for entertaining their schoolmates although there were so many of them, Spock couldn’t imagine why they would need to bring any more in.

The limousine was cold when they first got in and Spock wasn’t wearing mahire and his cloak was too short to be of any use to his legs. Father glanced down at him and then flipped a corner of his own cloak over Spock’s knees before he reached out to adjust the climate control.

“So,” said Father, settling back close to him and folding his hands in his lap, “you have been getting ahead in your studies again. That is commendable.”

Spock nodded. “I want to make certain that I will be doubled ahead this time at examinations.”

“You will.”

Father spoke with conviction. Father usually spoke with conviction and people usually listened to what he said. “Are you always certain of things, Father?”

Father’s eyes touched his and held him tight but not at all like when he was being disciplined.

“Of this I am.” He looked away for a moment. “You are a bright boy ad learning comes easy for you. Quickness often provides a ready excuse for laziness, but it is plain,” he said looking back, ‘that of this you are not guilty.”

“Mother says that I’m like you,” he offered, hoping that Father would agree. The answer he got was confusing.

“Your mother sees the good in you and attributes it to me, but she is a woman of great prejudice where I am concerned. But know this - your mother is also a woman of singular intelligence.”

“Some people don’t think that,” Spock said. 

Father nodded as if that idea did not surprise him. “Terran intelligence is not exactly the same as Vulcan. Your mother tackles problems in a very different manner than you or I do, but she arrives at the same answers. Most Vulcans do not understand this. Or they are bigoted. And bigotry is wasteful.” Father glanced out the window to see where they were. “It is the processing which is different, not the efficiency.”

“Is that why Mother must take special lessons?”

Father waited a moment before he spoke. “Yes. I have taught her all I can.”

“Mother knows more of mind technique than you do?” This surprised him. He thought Father knew all there was about it.

“No. Not yet.” Father’s eyes turned back to hold his again, even in the dark limousine. “You must understand, Spock, that I have undergone only the customary training that all Vulcans receive with a few added techniques that my life has necessitated. Except for initiating a link, your mother has learned all I have to offer her in this area. If she is to learn to initiate the contact on her own, I believe that it will take training of the sort that an expert such as the ilisor is capable.”

“But what if Terrans can’t set the link?” Spock asked. 

Father turned from him and peered from the window. “It will be a grievous disappointment to your Mother. Difficult for her to accept. This is why it is so important for you to learn to initiate yourself. Being able to touch minds with her heir with no interference from me would be to her a great joy and some consolation if it should develop that she cannot learn the technique herself.”

o0o

The seresa was just arriving as they were. She took them around to the side door and up to a sitting room overlooking the courtyard, throwing her driving gauntlets on the table near the servitor.

“Drinks?”

Father accepted one and so did Spock. The seresa looked down into the courtyard through the floor-length window.

“I thought they’d be finished by now. Oh...here he comes.”

Father and the seresa said a few things about Spock’s schooling that made Father nod in pride. When the ilisor came in, though, he was alone.

“Shor kirpa doiam, ilisor.”

“Bri or-e doiam, t’yetma.”

The seresa’s husband saw him and nodded. “And to you also, young Spock.”

“Your greeting is most kind, sir, and I return it tenfold.”

Father had taught him to say that and it always brought praise in glances. People were surprised when a boy his age spoke with such grace, sort of the way they were when other spoke Vulcan to them for the first time.

The seresa and her husband exchanged greetings, too, and touched their hands together the way his parents did. Father asked where Mother was.

“I have set her a meditation. She will be up shortly.” The ilisor glanced over to where his wife and Spock were standing.

“T’yetma, might I speak with you?”

They stepped away fir a moment and spoke quietly until Mother came in with her carry-bag and cloak over her arm.

“Must you leave immediately?” asked the seresa.

Spock yawned and put down his glass. The limousine was waiting outside.

“We’d better,” Mother said. “That one there should be in bed. He’s been on the javelin field most of the afternoon.”

Spock’s eyes popped open wide and he drew himself up to full height although staying might mean that he would be banished to the nursery with the other children. Even so, polite leave-takings were spoken and in a minute, the three of them were in the limousine speeding along the ground.

Mother had told the driver to go around the long way up to the lake and by Elsrhed Inn where they usually went to eat when Father made a mess of his turn at making dinner. He tried to stay awake but it felt like he had giant hygienic swabs under his eyelids when he tried to keep them open. Mother and Father were talking.

“He talked with you, didn’t he?”

A helpless breath went out. He thought it was from Father.

“There is no one else for you, Amanda, who can speak for you in these things. You do not know enough yet for...”

“Sarek, it’s all right.” Father was quiet while she spoke. “I’m glad you’re here for me.”

It was strange to hear them talk this way. Father’s voice was very different when he was talking to Mother alone.

“So, tell me. What did he say?”

“It seems I may have locked you up, Amanda. I was far too inexperienced to go so deep with someone to whom mental contact was new. Those first three times...”

“....are in the past, Sarek, and may have nothing to do with my trouble now. No one has seriously tried to instruct a non-Vulcan before, or at least spoken about it. Besides, the second and third times, I needed you. And the first...well, I wanted you, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

 

Spock thought they shifted on the seat because he felt the cushion go up and down under him. The next thing he heard was his mother’s voice.

“Oh, pick him up, Sarek. He’s pooped out.”

He heard the limousine door closing and the driver’s voice and the car going off into the night. He sailed through the garden and through doors with his head on Father’s shoulder. It was warm.

He pushed himself awake when they reached his room. He didn’t want anyone having to undress him like a baby. Even so, he did it with his eyes closed and they didn’t open again until the next day when he found that his right arm and shoulder were sore from the javelins. Mother found out when they went running in the morning and she made Father take care of him.

“Here,” she said, marching him in to his father who was just pulling himself from his bed, “you made the hurt, you make the cure.”

Father sent Mother for an analgesic and then rubbed his sore muscles with a cream that burned for a moment before it faded away. When Mother didn’t come right back, Father left him sitting on the edge of the bed and went to find her.

Spock reached for his desert suit jacket and lay back on the bed. From where he was lying, he could - if he stretched - reach the metal bars and turn the big stone beads with his toes. If Father came in now, he’d say for Spock to take his feet off Mother’s bed, even though Father slept there, too.

He knew it was Father’s bed because Spock used to find him there when he was a baby and needed help during the night. Once, when he was little enough to be impolite, he had asked Father why he was always with Mother when she was sleeping and Father had explained that she might need him during the night. Even when he was three, Spock could call out for FAther from his bed or the washroom if he needed help. But Earth women were probably different. In any case he wasn’t supposed to talk to people about it.

Mother and Father were coming back. Spock rolled back into a sitting position. Mother had the bottle of foul-tasting syrup you had to take when you had a headache and she looked like she meant to make him swallow some.

“But that’s for headaches,” he protested, knowing he sounded exactly like a baby and was ashamed for saying it even before the words left his mouth.

“It’s good for muscle aches, too. Now open up.”

He did and she squirted and he grimaced in spite of himself. There was a lot of it this time. It seemed that he had to take more in each dose every time.

Father had a glass of water for him and he took it thankfully, gulping it so fast that a stream drooled down each side of his chin. someone handed him a towel.

Father was massaging him again and this time when he moved to his chest, Spock jumped. It was without warning and he couldn’t help it. Mother shook her head.

“Good muscle tone is important, my wife, and one must have some pain at the beginning. As a matter of fact, a regimen of exercise could be beneficial to you as well, firming your arms, tightening your pectorals...”

“I’ll thank you to leave my pectorals out of it,” she said and marched off somewhere to do something as if she were angry with Father. But she wasn’t. somehow, being angry with him seemed the furthest thing from her mind.

 

Spock and his father went to the javelin field five more times in the next two months and Spock did nothing but improve - enough so that he was entered in the competition and, although he didn’t win a key, he did well enough to make the listing and to rate a trip to the small food sop connected to the import store where they had pizza and ice-cream and Mother and Father drank 7-Up. He drankDr. Pepper. Mother said the pizza wasn’t as good as on Earth where they threw them up in the air. It was just as well because Father never allowed him to play with his food.

o0o

Two more students were enrolled in English lessons and two were taken out so the number of desks remained the same. That happened a lot - parents or households put their children in English for a month or two and then took them out again. It took them that long to hear enough of how English lessons went to make them suspicious of the way Mother conducted them and to have second thoughts.

Grandfather said that some people thought that Mother was a bad influence on their children. Father said that if all it required was one Terran woman to subvert a dozen Vulcan youth, then all of their parents’ proud training was ineffectual at best, and they had only themselves to blame.

o0o

Two nights before the class picnic was Mother’s night for dancing. She appeared in the doorway of the sitting room and when she had their full attention, she stepped inside and spun around until the skirts of her robe stood like a seed pod whirling down from the sky. She wanted complimenting.

“So, how do I look?”

“Stunning, my wife, as usual. However, I certainly ope that there will be no vigorous dancing this evening.”

“Oh...you old fuddy-duddy!”

And then came the limousine to take her away and she was gone.

Once a month, Mother went to the Botanical Gardens where the orchestras practiced and people went to dance to their music. Aunt Dor-hu and dai-Uncle Lu-ki went too, and Grandfather was Mother’s partner in the paired dances.

Spock had cushions on the floor and was reading one of Mother’s paper books. He always washed his hands before and was very careful when he was reading so that he would not break the binding.

“What are you reading there, my son?”

Father leaned over the high arm of his sofa and looked down. 

Spock held the book up for inspection. “It’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ by L. Frank Baum.”

“Yes,” said Father, “I have read it.”

Spock offered him the book so that he could be questioned on his comprehension but Father gestured for him to take it back.

“It is a fantasy. Enjoy the book for its own sake.”

 

Sometimes Father took you by surprise that way by being more lenient than you expected him to be. It was like when he said something to purposely amuse Mother or touched his hand to your head or face or shoulder. It made the world seem tilted for a minute but you really weren’t especially motivated to set it right again.

“Father,” he said, “may I ask a question?”

“You may.”

“Why is it you never go to the Botanical Gardens with Mother? I think she would like you to.”

Father looked up from his own reading. Even though he hadn’t worked at Sinse since Spock was a baby, he still read all of the scientific journals.

“The reason that I do not go is that I am not well-versed in the dance. Your grandfather is much more agile than I and is therefore a better partner.”

Spock nodded and it was silent for a minute.

“Father?”

“Yes?”

“May I ask one more question?”

“As you will.”

“What is a...a ‘fuddy-duddy’?”

Father dimmed his screen but didn’t turn from it. “Fuddy-duddy’ is an English term used to describe an individual who is outmoded or old-fashioned.”

“It isn’t...Mother didn’t mean it as an insult...”

“No,” Father glanced his way. “We have spoken of Terrans and their joking. Your mother meant the term in a fond manner as in speaking the differences between she and I and her pleasure in them.”

“Oh.” That was half the question. He ventured the other half.

“Father, are you outmoded?”

He thought for a moment that he had spoken wrongly, but Father turned to gaze at him nearly the same way he did at Mother sometimes and said: “To your mother, Spock, everyone seems outmoded.”

o0o

 

Four

On the morning of the picnic, Spock and his father got out of bed early to take things outside. Or at least Father got up early for himj. While Mother slept late for a change they brought out tables and food and chairs, and there was an awning to put up.

“Please, t’yetma. Let me help.”

It was Noiard’s father. He set his things down and came over and suddenly the lower end of the sofa went up in the air. Noiard’s father wasn’t very tall, but he was bulky. A lot of the Forest people were that way, Father said.

“Thank you, h’daarin,” Father said when they had the sofa in place. “Your Englis is much improved since last we spoke.”

 

“I study every evening with my daughter.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder. “She is an apt teacher, and very strict with me. She will not allow a single word to slip from its place.”

Noiard came up and greeted Spock and his father, holding out the insutainer she had in her hands. “Here, your Excellency,” she said in English, ‘these are for you.”

They were markes rolled in nectar and then fried. Spock could make those only his tasted better. Father took them with gratitude and made several compliments to Noiard’s father about her saying that it must be difficult to refuse pride with such an heir to his name. Spock thought they were making an awful fuss about a dozen markes, especially ones that were all different sizes and burned on one side.

Noiard and her father helped them set the rest of the party things out. Noiard’s father always helped when there was a special project or an outing for English class. Today, he had tiny glazed leafrolls on trays and a canister of fresh brewers.

Mother had decided to wear Earth clothes for the picnic, but Father thought her trousers were too tight and made her go back and change. Everybody who was invited to the picnic came except for the new girl and her family. It was just as well because they would probably have ruined it anyway.

The new girl didn’t think so much of Mother or anyone who wasn’t Vulcan. Some people were like that, but it wasn’t so popular a way to think as it used to be.

The outworld guests were very friendly to all the Vulcans and asked them polite questions. The children had to translate from the English for their parents which made everybody proud of somebody - either of themselves or of their children. Mother listened to all of this with her almost-smile which made Spock wonder if she mightn’t have planned it to happen all along.

Ambassador Rosenberg was there with his wife. She wore a robe wit no shoulders in it, and he wore pants that showed his thighs with all the hair on them. When some of the Vulcan women asked her why she called herself by her husband’s name, Barbara Rosenberg said: “If you’d had the name I had before I married Paul, you’d know why I changed!” 

No one understood, but since everyone was being polite that day, no one asked her what she meant.

Sepek was there, of course, and it was ib’at’ye T’Uvri who accompanied him as well as his uncle and his cousin Penon. T’Penon. You had to remember that or you were in trouble. Desert clan girls made such a fuss when they were robed.

T’Penon came to greet Mother and was very polite to Father. They asked her how she liked her new school. Of course, they were all related to each other somewhere far back in the tribe - that is, except for Mother. T’Penon thought she was very dignified and grown up and condescending toward he and Sepek, but Sepek thought she was silly.

“Look at how she puffs out her chest,” Sepek whispered to him at the corner of the awning. “It won’t help her any. She thinks she’s a woman because she thinks she’s got breasts, but she doesn’t. I saw.”

Spock wondered when Sepek saw. He didn’t know. Sepek was the kind of person who would hide behind the curtains while you were having your bath and then tell people where you had moles growing. Mother couldn’t figure out why he was friendly to Sepek; well, Sepek was the kind of person you’d rather be a friend to than an enemy. It was safer that way.

o0o

When it came time for the entertainment, they all went behind the bushes and Mother lined them up, the taller ones in back, the shorter ones in front. The new girl was supposed to have stood in the back so they had to close up the space.

“Has everyone taken care of their bodily functions?”

One of the boys left in a hurry for the house. Mother never said that when it was just he and Father. She would say something like, “my teeth are floating’ and leave them trying to imagine such a thing.

“Are we ready now?” she asked when they were all together. “Is everyone’s hair combed” Sepek, let’s fasten our robe in front, shall we?”

They all slicked down their hair with their hands and waited for Sepek.

“Ser, is it time for us to say about breaking our arms?”

“Leg, Ran-lu. Yes, you can all tell each . Yes, Haf-risa?”

“I think we should say about both legs in case I lose my words.”

“Please, Ser, what if we make a mistake?”

“NO one will make a mistake. And everyone’s family will be very pleased. Spock, will you give us our tone?”

He hummed the starting note until everyone was humming it. He had a way of knowing tones in his head that was very convenient when someone needed to tune their lyre.

Mother went out and summoned the guests’ attention and explained that it was time for the entertainment. Haf-risa was to give the introduction and was whispering it quietly into the air. When they filed out, some of the outworlders started clapping and didn’t care if the Vulcans turned to stare at them. Haf-risa said the introduction without forgetting.

“Our class will present for your entertainment a song from the Earth which was taught to us by our ser Amanda. It is not in English, but in the ancient Terran language of Latin which was once the universal tongue of her world. Just as English is now the language of the Federation. OUr song is entitled ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ which, translated into Vulcan, means ‘ Give Us Peace’.”

 

Mother was right. There were no mistakes, and afterwards, each student was called before his or her family and praised. Mother had to explain all the noisy applause from the outworlders.

“It is the way of their worlds to express appreciation of the children’s presentation.”

“It seems a waste of energy,” said one of the mothers.

“Nevertheless, it is part of their cultures and should be taken as a compliment.”

o0o

Noiard’s baby brother had come with his mother. He could walk now and tried to follow Noiard everywhere. He would hold up his arms and make noise until she picked him up and bounced hin on her hip. Noiard let Spock hod Baby Tumisi once and, for awhile, he clung to Spock with one hand while he sucked on his other one. He smelled nice and powdery and had soft skin and warm chubby arms. Spock didn’t let him down until he cried and kicked his legs. It was all right for babies to cry and no one thought ill of them for it.

Just then, Noiard’s baby brother broke loose and stalked over to Spock’s mother on his fat legs and begged to be picked up. Mother took him and held him against her shoulder, speaking softly. “There he is...there’s my big boy...”

She said it in English, but the baby’s mother looked up. “That is very odd.”

Mother heard her and turned around. “Pardon, h’daar?”

She changed to Vulcan, shifting the baby to her other shoulder.

“My son is not in the habit of going to strangers.”

Mother sort of smiled the way she did when Vulcans were around, more with her eyes than with the rest of her face. “Oh, little Tumisi and I are great friends. Aren’t we?”

Tumisi answered by reaching for Mother’s great length of hair and getting it tangled in his pudgy fist. “We see each other all the time, don’t we?”

Spock saw Noiard’s father reach out and put a hand on his wife’s arm. “When I help with the school projects, my wife. You remember.”

Noiard’s father was uneasy. Spock could tell, Father always said that Mother ‘read all kinds of people with uncanny accuracy’. Father said that it was a useful talent. Spock didn’t think so. Knowing other people’s discomfort made his stomach roll.

Someone else had a baby but it was so small that it looked like a tiny figurine only louder. Its mother had to feed it several ties during the picnic so that it wouldn’t scream. And every time it got fed, it needed to be changed. 

He and Sepek watched its father going about its cleaning for a while until Sepek pulled him aside, whispering “I’m not going to do that.”

“What?”

“Have a wife and babies and have to change diapers and defer to her all the time.”

Of course he would. Father said that all boys were married when they became men, and had children taken of them. It was their duty to the clan and their proper function. He told Sepek so.

“Not for me. When it comes time for me to marry, I’ll just run away.”

“To where?”

As illogical as it was, it sounded intriguing.

“I don’t know,” Sepek admitted, “but it will be exciting. We could go out to the provinces or south to the Forest lands and make our living guiding people in hunts. We could become so good that the Chief herself would hire us as scouts. We could be famous.”

“We?”

“Sure. We could be companions and go together.”

Forgetting that neither he nor Sepek had ever been South, let alone hunted anything larger than tako lizards in the garden, it sounded terribly interesting and they sat by themselves in the corner of the garden making all sorts of plans.

o0o

People enjoyed the picnic and that surprised Spock. Some of the Vulcans continued to converse with the outworlders even after it stopped being polite to do so. The Plamese ambassador made such a fuss over the singing, praising to everyone’s parents and declaring that the class should sing for the VCIU’s next meeting, that two fathers thought that he was overcome by the heat and took him inside the house and put cool towels on his head.

“What is this ‘vee-cee-eye-you we are hearing of?” asked Sepek’s uncle.

“The Vulcanian Committee For Interstellar Understanding,” Spock’s father explained. “It is a group consisting of outworld people stationed here on Vulcan as well as interested citizens of ShiKar whose goal it is to promote appreciation and understanding among the Federation worlds. The Vulcan members endeavor to assist the alien members in adjusting to life here in ShiKar and to prevent their unwitting breakage of Vulcan law and custom.”

“I was unaware that such an organization existed.”

“Indeed? Perhaps before you leave, one of our guests might be willing to discuss the Committee with you.”

o0o

People kept eating and talking and enjoying themselves. That was until they forgot to release the pressure in the solar brewer and the top blew off and landed somewhere in the bushes.

“I’ll get it,” Spock volunteered and, kicking off his sandals, he dived into the bal-bal bushes. 

It was cool back there and if he kept low, the branches couldn’t scratch him. He’d gone in at the spot where the foliage was less dense near the ground from where I-chaya used to lie, pressing his broad back up against the trunks to scratch. He hadn’t thought about his selat for a long time, and now that he did, he pushed the thought away and kept crawling.

The bal-bal were denser over to the side. He didn’t think the top of the brewer had gone that far although some of the outworld guests had made a big noise when it flew off- clapping and laughing and stomping their feet -a s if they had thought that it was part of the entertainment. He was about to back out to where there was room to turn around and ceck back the other way when a precise angle of sunlight filtering down through the leaves - cautht on a lump of cut glass and flagged hi seye.

He dropped to his belly and wriggled forward the rest of the way and then dropped down nex to the brewer top to catch his breath. He could hear people talking.

“...did it once, it can be done again.”

“But why would they do it again?”

“Why not?”

That was Noiard’s father. Spock recognized his voice.

“You can see how well the first turned out.”

“Apparently. But he is a child. One can never tell what manhood will bring - if anything at all.”

They were talking about him. No one said hsi name, but he knew it anyway.

“Has he been pledged?”

They didn’t know. Father said that such things weren’t spoken of except by close family. Right now, he was thankful for that tradition.

“They say she was no more than a child when she bore him.”

There were quiet sounds of disgust. They were wrong. Mother was thirty-three years old now and he was ten: she had been twenty-three when he was born, not twenty.

“One cannot blame a girl of such years,” said woman who sounded like ib’at’ye T’Uvri. “One wonders of the man to have gone to a child so young.”

“Reason led, not years, if you can believe such a thing. And he is Desert Clan HIgh House, remember. They do as they wish.”

There was a clattering sound and then scuffling as if someone had knocked over a folding chair in haste and then hurried back to right it.

“I will not remain to hear such words spoken about our hosts and in their own garden.”

That was Noiard’s father again.

“You are quite ... fond... of the Terran ser, are you not, h’daarin Yaiad?”

Noiard’s father didn’t have a chance to answer before a woman did.

“If you were my husband, h’daarin, I would not allow you to spend so much time alone with her. These Terran women can be dangerous.”

Dangerous? Mother?

“I will have you to understand, h’daar, that the ser Amanda has been nothing but gracious to me and has treated me with the utmost respect and thoughtfulness in our association. And I shall thank you to refrain from such improper insinuations in my presence.”

“Such airs! And of which great household did thee arise?”

“I may be an unknown man from an undistinguished house who knows nothing but the duties to his wife and children, but in my mother’s house we were taught to be respectful of our hosts when we were guests in their home. You will excuse me.”

Once Noiard’s father had left, they continued. It was rude and disrespectful, but Spock stayed.

“It’s illogical, you know. He is of an age. He could get himself an heir withhalf the trouble it takes for these half-breeds. I doubt that many women would walk away from such a proposition. I’d wager a third of the women here today would take the chance to assure her daughter the wealth and influence his seed would bring. You know they cut him off from the clan accounts.”

“Really?”

“His mother’s estate has been tied up in trust.”

“But this house...”

“I hear he had some of his own money. Ran through it quick enough with the expenses when the boy was born. There was a special benor brought from the Earth, I understand.”

They were talking now about Father. And about him. Grandmother had been born into the highest ranking household in the clan, but she had come south when they named ShiKar the capital and started her own. Father was just a baby then, if you could imagine such a thing. They were very important people in Taimun and everywhere but they never visited. When Grandmother died, they’d made his uncle go and live there. That was another time Mother had cried.

“You know, if he can produce full seed of this marriage, he can claim the line for her. T’yelik T’Pau would only control half of the house.”

“I think it unnatural.”

“Unnatural or not, it’s his only chance. A Vulcan mate would do him no good.”

Unnatural. Spock swallowed a lumpy breath. They were talking about him.

“Really, ib’at’ye. You’re not making sense.”

“Maybe not, but it is so. There was much speculation when his mother’s final intentions were read. The younger son was left the house and most of the moram’s personal estate. The t’yetma’s inheritance consisted of a modest lump sum of money, some moderately valuable stocks, and the privilege of drawing the second line of the High House through him if he should sire a female of his Terran wife.”

“It didn’t say that...”

“No. As a matter of fact, it stated the woman by name so as to preclude any question - ‘Amanda Grayson’ I believe is the proper name.”

“I don’t believe that. Why would a brilliant scientist such as T’Pir Shidamikan leave such a statement?”

“Nevertheless, it was left - questioned but uncontested. She had filed the thing in person with the local tribal authorities herself - just days before her death.”

They were calling for him. He had been back there too long. He heard his mother and Barbara Rosenberg down near where he had gone in.

“Spock? Spock, are you in there?”

“I guess we’ll have to beat the bushes for him.”

If they found him where he was, they would know that he had been spying and he would have to make apologies in front of the whole class and their parents and the outworlders as well. He had to get out. He crawled backward into where the branches came down lower and where one of them went up his robe and jabbed him so that he almost cried out loud. He bit down on his lower lip and kept moving for what seemed forever until the less dense area where he had gone in. He could hear his mother calling him.

“Spock? Come on out. We can look for it later. Spock?”

He backed out of the bushes and pulled the brewer top out of the front of his robe where he had put it. 

“It was was far back,” he explained but didn’t venture to tell them which way. His mother thought he looked pale and sent him into the house for awhile which was how he came to see the Plamese ambassador being restrained by the Vulcans and made to keep still.

He splashed water on his face in his parents’ wash room and took some of the stomach complaint medicine because his watery insides had congealed into a hard knot and Father would have made him take it anyway. It tasted bad, but not as bad as mother’s mixture which he had tried once by accident.

On the way out, he passed the Plamese ambassador who was finally speaking quietly although not in any language the vulcans could understand. Spock saw himreach into his jacket and pull out his playing cards and begin to do his tricks. Father said that it was very clever slight -of-hand, but you could never catch him at it. Too many hands to watch.

Sepek was waiting for him at the door and they made Noiard go away from them. Noiard had always been friendly to him, but he had to ask Sepek about this inheritance thing that he had overheard. Sepek was of his tribe and it had been his great-grandmother who had known of the line claim. And if it were a secret or scandalous in some way, Sepek would know about it.

Five

There was a lot of food left over from the picnic even though most everybody had taken something home with them. Mother had eaten too much and so had Father, but Mother had tasted everything that everybody had brought and was sicker-looking than he was. Noiard’s father called in the morning to see if there was anything else he could do to help return the garden to normal and Mother told him, no. she also told him something that wasn’t the truth.

“No, thank you, h’daarin. You and my husband did such a good job last night I think the garden’s in better shape than it was when we moved here.”

 

His father and Noiard’s father had carried everything back into the house and then raked the sand after. That was the truthful part. It was the nex that bothered Spock.

“But that baby of yours! He’s getting so big! He’s almost as handsome as his father!”

Mother went on embarrassing Noiard’s father for several minutes before she got off the visicom and found Spock and Father staring at her.

“What’s the matter? Did I suddenly grow two heads?”

Spock waited to see if Father would say anything. Father usually didn’t scold people when others were listening.

“Amanda Jaquith...”

“What? What did I do?”

“... such falsehoods outside the household and in the presence of our son...”

Mother’s eyebrows went together. Didn’t she know she had lied?

“The garden comment could be argued, but h’daarin Yaiad is not what anyone would call handsome.”

Mother sighed and reached for her juice. “Really, Sarek, I don’t see what harm it is to give him and his baby a compliment.”

“But it is untrue.”

“It’s only a little white lie.”

What was that? Spock knew all about falsehoods and how an honorable person could avoid them while also avoiding revealing matters which he did not want to be discussed. Mother didn’t seem at all concerned.

“Lies are not honest, my wife, whatever their size or color.”

“I suppose you’d want me to tell the absolute truth every minute of the day.”

“It would be logical.”

“It would be cruel.”

There was an argument coming, but Spock thought that it was a half-spirited one - like they had already had it before and no one had been the winner and no one was likely to be.

“Amanda...”

“It would have been cruel to tell Paul Rosenberg that, including the music tapes he brought,his shirt was the loudest thing at the picnic, or that Barbara should lose at least twenty kilograms before she wears that sundress again.”

“Amanda...”

“And what about Noiard? Those markes were awful! And so were half the things those parents brought over. Should I have told Ib’at’ye T’Uvri that her pickled uda stalks were the worst I had ever tasted or that her son has the skinniest legs I have ever seen on a grown man?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, there.” Mother put her juice down without drinking any of it. “There’s no need to hurt someone’s feelings if it can be avoided.”

“One can avoid perjuring oneself just as easily, Amanda.”

Mother sighed again. “Sarek, I’m not a Vulcan and I’m not a diplomat.”

“No one is asking you to become either, Amanda.” Father had put down his spoon. “But our son is the first and I am both., and I am concerned that he will misunderstand what is expected of him if he sees that his mother speaks untruths so easily and without regret.”

Mother was supposed to set a good example for him. Older people were always supposed to present themselves as a model to younger people. The ser were always telling you that at school.

“Really, Sarek. Spock knows the difference between a little white lie and thekind that can hurt people. Don’t you, Spock?”

Before he had a chance to think he was in a hole again, Mother turned back to Father and went on, “You know what I think? I think you’re just jealous because I told another man he was handsome.”

Father denied it on the grounds that Mother was applying emotional terms to him which were completely inappropriate and he declared that h’daarin Yaiad was embarrassed by the comments.

“Oh, he liked it, Sarek.”

“Nevertheless, it is impolite to speak of a man’s beauty in the presence of others. Neither is it your place to make such a comment. It is not in the tradition.”

“Sarek,” Mother said suddenly with a look of total exhaustion, “it’s entirely too hot this morning for logic and tradition.”

She got up from the cutting table and left the dishes to him and Father. Whenever Mother said that it was too hot for something, it was a warning that you had better stop doing that something or there would be a lot of trouble.

o0o

Everybody from English class talked about the party and soon everybody at school knew about it. Some people said it wasn’t anything special and that it didn’t count for anything in your ACL, but when it got around that ambassadors from other worlds had been there, the picnic became an exciting adventure at least .

Barbara Rosenberg had taken pictures. Spock was allowed to bring them in and show them to the class and some of the stills were mounted out in the hallway for everyone to see. Political theory class invited him to bring them there, too. Even if people said they didn’t matter, they all wanted to see. Spock was beginning to see what his mother meant when she said that curiosity got the better of people.

o0o

Mother was overworking herself - that’s what Father said when he made her go to bed early two nights in a row. She usually went to bed after Spock did and woke to run down the walkways before anybody, including the sun, was quite up. Spock went with her sometimes when he was awake, and it was hard for him to keep up. Now she was too tired to go.

Finally, Father sent her to the Earth Embassy for a meat dinner. The first time he had heard about MOther eating the flesh of animals. he had been shocked. He couldn’t imagine his own mother doing such a thing, especially when she’d hide little bits of food in her carry-bag to feed to the rock chickens that sat on a perch in the waiting room of h’daarin Wat-fafa’s tailor shop. But of course, he had thought then that she could have been fattening them up so that they would make more food. He knew now that Mother wouldn’t eat someone’s pet, but in any case, it made him nauseous.

things at school went on about the same as they ever did. Because of the picnic, people paid more attention to Spock than he would have liked, but at least it wasn’t to ridicule him. Noiard’s father invited some of the English students over again, and Sepek pulled him into spying on T’Penon and her friends, but they were caught and put out of the garden with the sort of threats you couldn’t report back to the adults about.

 

On the morning of the athletic exhibition, Spock rode to school in the limousine with Mother even though people would talk. Father thought that it was too hot to walk, but Spock knew that his mother would do it anyway if he did.

Sepek wasn’t anywhere around when Spock got to the drilling yard but Noiard stood with him and spoke English with him until the trainers came out. She hadn’t even known how to say ‘my name is...’ when she started but she could talk up a storm in it now. Sepek didn’t want her around because he said she was too little, but Spock thought it was just because she could speak English so much better than he could.

So he and Noiard talked about how some of the teachers weren’t half so fair as the ser Amanda, and how the seresa was late to the last assembly because she’d overturned her sand-sled in the desert beyond where you were supposed to go with the rentals. When it was finally time for drills, Spock realized that he still had his mother’s tape case from the limousine. As soon as the doors opened, he hurried inside to give it to her and found her crying in the supply closet.

She wasn’t loud about it, making lots of noise and hysterics the way he’d seen some outworlders do - no, it was just sniffs and soft little sounds very lonely and very sad.

He couldn’t go in to help her; he wouldn’t know what to do. Father would. Father would go to her and let her cling to him until she felt better, and he would say things to quiet her. What they were, Spock never knew because he was always told to leave the room.

 

And that’s just what he would do now - close close the supply closet door until just a crack was open and tiptoe out of the classroom before she knew he was there. And he kept the tape case and carried it with him until English class.

o0o

But he kept on thinking about it for the rest of the day and, after dinner, he went to talk to Father about it.

He could hear Father’s voice coming from the study. No one answered him in-between times so he knew Father was on the visicom.

Spock waited in the hall, leaning up against one of the walls. Maybe he shouldn’t tell. Father said that it was imperative to allow people their privacy. A well-bred gentleman did not pry. But Father also said that they were to look out for Mother’s welfare and see that she was kept cheerful and contented. If she was crying, she was neither and he didn’t know how to stop it.

Father had finished talking. That meant he was off the visicom. Spock peered around the door-jamb. Father was writing something on a piece of plastiform, his right hand still resting on the keypad. Father always looked odd writing.

Although the door was open, Spock waited in the doorway until his father heard him jiggling the handle and looked up. “If you’re busy, I could come back later...”

 

“Not at all. Come in, son.”

Spock went in and stood halfway behind one side of the desk curtains until Father told him to sit in the chair where people sat when they wanted to discuss things with him. His feet couldn’t touch the floor in it, but it wasn’t as big as the one Father sat in. The smaller one used to be behind the desk until Mother bought the big chair for him the fifth year they were married. Father said that his chair was actually more the style of Mother’s desk although in darker wood. Father’s desk wasn’t very old;, but MOther’s was, even if it was a new style. Mother didn’t like side curtains.

“I need swingin’ room, “ she always said, and would swing her arms out wide. “Careful, my wife, “ Father would say, “or you shall deck both of your gentlemen.”

A deck was the floor of a vessel like a starliner or a starship, Father had explained and, used as a berb, to deck meant to strike someone violently enough to knock them onto it.

“I surmise that you wish to speak with me?”

“Yes, Father.” He was here now, sitting in Father’s old desk chair. He couldn’t just walk away.

“Well? You have my attention.”

“I’m not sure if I should tell you.”

It was a stupid thing to stay. Father’s eyebrows went up once and came down again.

“I see.” He picked up his pen as if he were going to write something. “But since I may not advise you as to whether I should be confided in until I am appraised of the topic, the only logical avenue available to you is that you inform me.”

Father was right. “Mother was crying today.”

Eyebrows up and down, like two paintbrushes. “For what reason?”

“I don’t know, Father.” And he didn’t. And he didn’t want to be blamed.

“Where did this happen?”

“At school. Before class.”

“Was she seen by others?”

“No Father. And I didn’t let her see me.”

Father was looking at something that he couldn’t see. “Where is she now?”

Before he’d come up to the study, he’d seen Mother heading outside and he told Father so.

“You stay inside, Spock. I will see to it.”

 

Father was almost to the door before he glanced back and siad, “you were correct to come to me with this, Spock. And I am pleased to discover that you are mindful of your mother.”

His feelings must have shown n his face because Father actually turned full around and gestured for him to come near.

“You are not to be concerned, my son.” A big warm hand rested on his shoulder and it barely felt strange at all. “You must understand that it is the way of Terrans to have periods of emotionally erratically behavior. It is not serious and it passes.”

Father’s eyes were soft and, when he reached up to pat his face, his hand was, too.

“But more of this later when you are a much older boy. go on now about your studies.”

Father left then and Spock followed him part way until he got to his own room and went right to his studies. He liked Father this way. He almost thought his sickness had been good for him.

His desk looked out on the side garden toward the vento trees that blocked the view from outside. Mother was there, standing beside the bal-bal bushes picking at the blossoms when Father found her. She didn’t even jump when he put his hand on her shoulder from behind. Did it feel so warm and heavy to her?

Father said something to Mother and she answered him, shaking her head and starting to walk away. He couldn’t hear, but he knew Father wasn’t satisfied with her answer because he made her come and sit with him on the bench and hold his hand. He watched until Father reached out and made Mother look at him. It made him remember Father’s hand on his face and it frightened him a little. He took his schoolwork away from the window and did it on his bed.

They were awake most of the night. Spock knew it without hearing a word because he heard Father in the kitchen making tea every time he woke up. The pot you made it in made a sound like a waft-catcher when the wind came up when the water was hot enough. At least he thought it was Father. It could have been Mother, although it was Mother feeling poorly and Father would be serving her. He wondered what had upset her this time. He knew it hadn’t been him or Father would have called him up long before this. No, it was someone else this time.

You could hurt Mother so easily. Once, when he was five, he had told her how some of his schoolmates had been teasing him because he was part Terran and she had tried all through dinner and most of the evening. She would stop for awhile and then start up again later until he wondered how she could make so many tears so fast. Father had spoken harshly to him about upsetting her and had made him apologize.

It hadn’t been fair. He was the one who had been called names and nudged off the walkway, and it had been Mother who had asked him what was troubling him and who had made him tell. Even when you thought you were smooth, Mother just looked right through you with her icy blue Terran eyes and you were caught in your deception.

Mother wasn’t weak though. Father had said, just tender of heart. Gentle people often found hurts in quiet places. Well, Mother had told him that Father was really a very gentle person, but he never let things people said unsettle him. Nothing ever bothered Father.

Mother really did get upset easily. And after that time when he was five, he never told her when people called him names. He never told anybody.

 

Six

Father made breakfast in the morning but Spock ate it anyway. When he asked where Mother was, he was told that she was in meditation.

“She has an important decision to make.”

Now he knew. It all probably had to do with the possibility of Mother’s going ot the Mental Research Institute in Hirhansa and being separated from jFather for a long time.

No wonder she had been crying. Mother was always agitated when Father left town without her. She and Father enjoyed each other’s company like companions rather than married people, but Father was never agitated when Mother was gone; he would sit quietly  
reading a book or play roshvagor tami with Spock. Mother, though cold become very sad without Father around although he had never seen her cry about it before. Maybe she thought she’d have to stay a whole term in Mirhansa. That would upset her.

Mother didn’t accompany him to school that morning but she was there by time for English lessons and not putting up with any foolishness from Sepek. She didn’t tolerate anything from anybody anymore. She would complain to the other ser if they kept any students past their assigned interval and made them late for English. Father said that she was within her rights and that the others would complain if she kept students late. But it was not how Mother used to be.

Mother went home right after second English lesson. A limousine came to pick her up , and Spock had the notion when he saw it that Father was inside. Noiard had invited several of the English students to her house to study, and after they had all been fed, Spock went home to find a note from his Father saying that he and Mother had gone to theinn for dinner and to help himself to the last of the gorspn. They were hard to get, and Father’s favorite, and Mother always teased him about sharing them with the household. Mother wasn’t terribly fond of them, but Spock was, and Father always saved a handful for him even if company came.

o0o

He didn’t hear his parents come in, but Mother was feeling much better in the morning. She came to breakfast with father, laughing.

“I do, after all,hold myself to some of the blame,” Spock overheard his father say gravely. Mother swung away from him and pulled open the cupboard. “Well, I certainly hope so.”

Somehow, this was very funny to Mother because she started ot laugh. Father seemed embarrassed. That made Mother laugh even more and she nearly spilled the eiak powder.

“Let me help you,” Father said, going to her. She pushed him away as if she were impatient with him and said, “...Zar...”

Father nodded as if he had been bound into a promise that he really didn’t want to keep, and told Spock to hurry and fill the servitor.

Mother had settled her mind about Mirhansa. She was to go for an entire term to the Mental Research Institute, but not until the next ear. That surprised Spock. He had thought that she was going to have to go right now.

But an entire term? He’d never thought of that. Who would teach English? Who would take him sand-sledding? How would he and Father survive ob Father’s cooking? Spock was concerned.

o0o

Mother’s spirits rose as the days went by, but it wasn’t just Mother who felt better. FAther was having little arguments with he and Mother that were not meant to be quarrels but only to show that he was mindful of them. One day at breakfast he kept making criticisms  
about everyone eating sugary pastries and all the time he kept serving them and eating them himself, one right after the other.

His mother took another pastry, laughing and shaking her finger at Father.

“You,” she said, popping the small roll into her mouth, “you have to watch your figure.”

She whirled away from the table, her thin robe swirling about her, wrapping her like a tight bandage.

“I?” Father’s left eyebrow lifted just a hair. “I, madam?”

Spock nodded, feeling the strange but pleasant flutter that filled his chest whenever his parents jousted in his presence.

“Yes, Mother. It’s you who should be careful. You’re becoming too fat.”

Even before the words were out of his mouth, even before all talking ceased, even before his mother coughed on the half-chewed pastry in her mouth, Spock felt a chilling silence break inside of him.

“I’m...I’m sorry, Mother,” he said, stammering with embarrassment. “I...I’m truly sorry.”

His mother turned her back but Spock didn’t think that she was angry or hurt at all. This confused him more.

“Spock...” His father’s voice was unreadable. “...I will see you in the hall.”

A glance at his father told him that he should leave now and that he would be joined later. Glancing once more at his mother’s turned back, Spock slid from his chair and left the room. Ashamed, he stood near the archway and strained to hear if anything was said. His father’s words were unintelligible. Then he heard his footsteps and braced himself for the worst.

“Please, Father. I am sorry for what I said to Mother. I am so ashamed. Let me go to her and make apologies.”

Father shook his head. “There is no need. Your mother did not take offense.”

“But I said she was fat.”

Again Father nodded. “The mistake is mine for neglecting to speak with you earlier, and you are a very observant boy.”

He gestured for Spock to take a seat on the hall bench but did not look directly at him.

“As you have noticed, your mother has been gaining weight. But it is not because she has been eating too much. It is because she is efa lir.”

Father’s gaze shifted back to him again. “You do remember what ‘efa lir’ means?”

Spock forced his head to move up and down, “it means that she will have a baby.”

“That is correct.”

Spock nodded politely to his father, but inside, in his own mind, he was confused. He had been told before that there would be no brothers or sisters for him and that he was forbidden to even mention the subject to his mother. Now he discovered that another child was in the making and no one seemed the least bit alarmed by it.

His father continued, “For the time being, Spock, you will not need to mention the pregnancy to others. It is your mother’s prerogative when she shall make the announcement. When she does, there will, most likely, be...comment. If asked, you will say that the child is your ‘double-sibling’. Until then, this knowledge belongs to this household alone..”

“Yes, Father.”

Spock sat without moving for a moment. He felt as if he were intruding somehow. “Shall I go now and apologize to Mother? It was disrespectful of me no matter what the cause.”

Father looked at him for a moment, then nodded him way. “Spock...”

Spock turned, his hand on the doorframe.

“You may notice that your mother is somewhat emotional - more emotional than is normal for her. This is to be expected of an Earth woman in this condition. We will continue in our usual manner of dealing with this, although any tenderness you may wish to display to her in the confines of this household would not be out of line with the situation.”

“Yes, Father.”

The hallway seemed shorter than before. Spock remembered his mother crying the other day. Was it because of - because of the baby? Father had said that Mother had a decision to make, but once you had a baby coming, what sort of decision could there be?

Spock found his mother in her bedroom brushing her hair. she had not been near the tonsor for many visits and it was becoming quite long. “Come in, dear.”

He made apologies quickly and as sincerely as he could manage. His mother did not seem angry with him. She nodded all the way through and then there was a smile.

“Did your father talk to you?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Could you specify please, Mother, as to the opinion you would wish of me?”

“About the baby dear,” she said impatiently.

She wanted his opinion. But what difference would it make if she had already begun it? “I..I think that it is very logical for you and Father to have a baby.”

This made her laugh. She shook her head in amusement. “Oh, Spock! Logic had nothing to do with it.”

She laughed for a while before she could speak clearly.

“Spock,” she said when she had calmed herself. “I want you to know something about this baby. It isn’t just your father’s and mine. This is going to be your baby, too.”

What he thought in his mind must have shown in his face for his mother laughed even more. “Of course, you won’t have your father and I to yourself anymore. You’ll have to share us with this baby - and other things, too. And you know, this will almost be more your baby than ours because you’re.l”

 

Her voice broke off and a little light went out of her eyes. “Well...you’ll be closest to it in age. Can you see that?”

Spock nodded, although he didn’t understand why his mother’s eyes had dimmed. And the sharing part - he didn’t mind that at all. That’s what he had wanted for a long time: someone to share all of it with.

 

Seven

It was almost New Years and Mother hadn’t told anyone about the baby. You couldn’t really see it growing unless her clothes were very thin or tight. Sometimes she got angry for no reason or sad for no reason, but Father had told him not to concern himself because it was normal for Earth women. As men of the household, he and Father’s job was to make her as comfortable as they could.

Mother and Father had long discussions at dinnertime about what their baby would be called. You weren’t supposed to tell a baby’s name until the naming ceremony so everything had to be a suggestion. If the baby was either a girl who looked Vulcan or a boy who looked Terran, the names were settled because it would be named after Father’s mother or Mother’s father even if Grandfather Reese was still alive. The only other thing that they could agree upon was that Mother would suggest Earth girls’ names to Father and that he would help Mother with names for Vulcan boys.

“Amanda, this is a serious matter.”

“But you don’t like anything I suggest.”

“I will not have a daughter with a fussy name. The name should connote strength and dignity.”

“All right, Sarek. What ‘strong and dignified’ names did you have in mind?”

“I have given that much thought.”

Father opened a small book he had near his plate. “What do you think of the name ‘Constance’? Such a name conjures an image of stability and dependability. ‘Constance Grayson Sarekikan’. She could be addressed by her initials, ‘C.G.’ as you were as a child as was the Grayson practice.”

“It was the Jaquiths that did that.”

“‘C.J.’ then.”

Mother looked as if she might be ill.

“You do not like ‘Constance’ then? Well - “ he consulted his book again “ - do you like ‘Courtenay’ better?”

“If it’s between those two, I’ll take ‘Courtenay’. But these Vulcan desert male names you’ve given me...” She held up a piece of paper that looked at least ten years old and turned up her nose. “The only good one on the list has been taken.”

Mother passed the list to Spock and he found his name, Spok, with a big ‘X’ next to it. “What about you, Spock? What name do you like?”

He didn’t even have to think about that one “‘Selek’” he said. 

Mother hesitated for a moment and then reached over to write it on the bottom of her list. “What do you think, Sarek? ‘Selek Amandikan’.”

Father nodded. “Yes,” he said, “It is a good name from our tribe.”

o0o

It was New Years that finally brought out the news. Everybody went into the city for the procession and the casting down of weapons. Someone commented after they turned their backs on their ceremonial blades that T’yetma Sarek’s wife was seen eating part of a leafroll during the invocation. Since the only people who weren’t allowed to fast were babies and women having them, people cold infer. The only reason that it didn’t spread like bal-bal pollen was that people assumed that Mother wasn’t fasting because she was Terran, but eventually it got around because Grandfather’s house knew that Mother normally fasted during the Lost Days because she said that it made it easier on father and, ever since his Kas Wan, him too.

After the holiday, school started up again and when Spock got to his second English lesson, he found everybody gathered at the front of the room around a sofa that had appeared there between lessons for some unknown reason. It was a nice sofa, even though it looked old, and even though it smelled a little like telfu.

“I wonder where it came from?”

“From the school basement,” said Sepek, pointing at the emblem sewn into the arm. He wrinkled up his nose. “What a stench!”

It wasn’t that bad. Spock was standing just as close as Sepek was and the smell wasn’t so strong. Sepek just liked to complain.

Noiard sat on the edge of the plushy sofa and ran her hands over the woodenknob at the high end as if she were reading the carving with her palm.

“I wonder who sent it?” she asked, more to herself than to anyone else. “Maybe she has an admirer.”

Haf-risa dropped down beside Noiard and bounced on the seat. “Who would give a school sofa as a present?”

“Especially one that smells so bad.”

“I know what it smells like. It smells like excrement.”

“Sepek, you look like excrement.”

“If I look it, you sound it.”

“Well, what’s this?”

In other classes, they would have scattered for their desks; here, they got ot their feet and gathered around their teacher, standing in the attitude of prespect. Spock didn’t think that they should all crowd around her so much.

“It’s a sofa, “ said Haf-risa nodding in its dirction. “From the basement.”

 

They made way for the ser to approach the sofa, and when she did, she turned up her nose.

“Well, it certainly needs a good airing.”

“You see?” said Sepek smugly, ‘you see? It does smell bad.”

“What is is for, Ser?”

Mother patted the high arm and leaned down to look at the carving. She almost smiled. “I suppose that the seresa thought I might wish to rest between classes.”

“Are you ill then, Ser?”

“Maybe,” said one of the girls, “you should go home to your bed and have your husband bring yuou some yakobspru.”

 

“The ser prefers tea,” said Noiard, always the one to remember.

“No, no,” said MOther, “I’m not ill at all.”

 

“Then why do you need the sofa?”

“I know.”

It was the new girl.

“Oh? Do you? Mother took a seat on the sofa and looked up at her. “Why don’t you tell us all?”

The new girl looked at Mother for a full gajn it seemed before finally answering.

“I know,but it’s not for me to tell.”

Oh, she didn’t know at all. That was just a diplomatic ruse to make her appear more knowledgeable than she was. The others mightn’t know that, but he did.

Mother stood up. “Very well. And since you can’t tell us about the sofa, perhaps you can be more specific about last night’s translation. All right, the rest of you, let’s take our seats.”

 

o0o

In not too many days, the other children at school knew about Mother’s baby. First, the female teachers had discovered it, then the other teachers, and finally, the students. One day, the girls in English class all gathered around Mother and shooed the boys away. They talked ot Mother for part of the actual class period and later gave her a present. And they weren’t even properly girls yet.

Spock had decided that the baby would be a girl. Or Father had. Father spoke about when his heir would be born and what had to be done and how she would have to be cared for. She would be the heir to his name and property just as Spock was heir to Mother’s. Mother wanted the baby to be a girl as well, so he decided that a sister would be the best so that everyone could have what they wanted.

A sister. She would be very tiny at first, he knew, but soon she would be able to talk and walk. He could take her by the hand and lead her in the park then. He had begun practicing with his javelins every day to strengthen his shoulders so that before that, he could carry her about in a sling the way older people did. Mother had told him that the baby was to be his as wll as hers and Father’s to care for and, being the elder he thought he would be allowed the responsibility for little Courtenay Jaquith.

o0o

Because of the baby, Mother had to stop her mental training with the ilisor and so she was at home every night except for on thsoe she went with Aunt Dor-hu to the athletic club. After dinner, they all began to gather in the study - he and Father at the table and Mother on the sofa - each doing their own work. It was reassuring for Spock to sit across from jFather while he read reports or wrote some of his own and know that Mother was also nearby, complaining about the Vulcan lack of interest in psychology until Father reminded her that she would be in Mirhansa soon enough and could set the entire world straight at that time.

Sometimes they would just read together or listen to tapes or play games with Mother’s cards or, on some nights, Spock wold get his lyre and play until they were all hoarse from singing or until Mother fell asleep with her head on Father’s shoulder. Mother and Father botgh knew Earth songs and theyu would hum the tunes to him so that he could finger them.

 

Mother would sit on the sofa with cushions or one of Father’s arms to support her back which hurt her now sometimes, and Spock would sit at their feet and play until his fingers ached. Father made Mother sing chi-chi echoes with him until MOther grew out of breath and started laughing.

“Unable to keep up with your husband, I see.”

“It’s not fair.” She slapped FAther’s chest lightly with the flat of her hand. “Look at the size of those lungs!”

 

It seemed for a moment that Father might do the same to her, but in the end, all she got was an eyebrow in the air.

“I wonder if little Courtenay Jaquith will sing like you, Mother,” Spock thought out loud. Mother didn’t sing like Vulcan women but she didn’t sing like children either. It was different, and he liked it. So did Father.

No one answered him at first and when he looked up, Spock found Father gazing at Mother with raised eyebrows.

“It seems, Amanda, that our son knows something that we do not.”

They both turned ot look at him with warm eyes. What did they mean? Oh no.

What had made him blurt the name out loud? It was his secret - thinking that the baby would be ‘Courtenay Jaquith’ and how they would be inviolate partners in everything - even to indiscretions - and how he would teach her and keep other people from ill-treating her. Father said that she would be called ‘C.J’, but Spock knew that, as surely as Surak calmed the tribes, Grandfather would take a name like that and it in the Mountain fashion, jus as he knew that her eyes would be blue like Mother’s and that her hair would be faded. She wouldn’t have to do Vulcan things any more than Mother did, or train for the Kas Tor. Terrans didn’t take endurance tests.

“Is that how you imagine the baby, dear?”

He thought that he was going to be very embarrassed, but Mother was pleased and Father even encouraged him to speak his thoughts and nodded in approval of all his plans.

“And I also thought that Courtenay Jaquith’s cradle could be in my room so that she wouldn’t be alone in the dark if she should cry out in the night. I could see to her then and she would not disturb you.”

Mother and Father didn’t like being disturbed once they had gone to bed. Courtenay Jaquith would be too little to know better and he could keep her out of trouble. Father didn’t agree this time.

“Not at firts, my son. The baby will need your mother close for a time. After the first weeks though, we can discuss it.”

Father turned to Mother then, gesturing to Spock. “You see, Amanda? He is pleased with the coming of the child.”

Father turned to him again. “YOur mother had some notion that you would not welcome a new sister. You see, Amanda, how illogical an idea that was?”

“Oh, Sarek, you’re as bad as he is,” she said, but she was embarrassed. That was turning the wheel to the hind-side. And why would he not welcome Courtenay Jaquith? She would be half-bred like him and, even more, she would be Terran.

 

Eight

That’s who she would be. Courtenay Jaquith Sarekikan. Spock had decided that. Father and Mother didn’t need another son, and he thought that the odds might be against having another Vulcan baby. All Vulcan genes were not dominant over all Earth genes. They could just as easily - more easily, Father said - have a baby who was physiologically more like Mother. And besides, they already had him.

He knew the general odds of having a girl - a little less than fifty per cent. that was because more boy babies were born to make up for those who didn’t survive. Males died easier it seemed. There were many other factors involved. Still, the odds should change in favor of a girl if a boy was already there. Or maybe not. There were so many genes involved that it might make no difference at all which kind were used before. Just thinking about it was a certain waste of time. Father had taught him that if he wanted to know the answer to something, he had better make a search for himself. 

Spock gathered all the data he had on his parents that he thought might be pertinent to the question - that they already had on Vulcan boy, how many brothers and sisters they had and how many aunts and uncles there were too. He even put in the factors of Vulcan and Terran genetic material. Father had two sisters and a brother. Mother had one brother. He also knew that Great-Grandfather Shidham had lots of boys but only one girl - that would go against having a girl.

Spock fed in any and all factors which he thought pertinent. He was clever at that, so clever in fact that he did not take the computer course at school but had special instruction from Father. The secret to competent analysis was in choosing the right data to enter in the first place. A computer could analyze but it could not think. That part was left to people.

Father’s terminal was more sophisticated than his, but he could get onto Sinse’s log by calling through it. Father had given him the code when he’d figured out how to get on without it. But that was a long time ago when he was only eight.

Father used to work at Sinse once when he was a scientist. He had been a theoretical biophysicist when he was in Grandmother’s lab. That was before Spock was born. Father had written programs that could test hypotheses that other laboratories had to do on the bench. Father had several awards on his office wall from then.

Something wasn’t right. He wasn’t getting anything. The program was running, but it was giving him zero probability. that was nonsense. He ran it again, only this time for male offspring. He got the same thing. Well, for both then. He watched the numbers run up the screen and dart across it in all the correct patterns. The data was going in and through.

Zero probability.

The computer screen looked back at him, a big unwinking eye. A hard knot was forming right behind his navel and it felt like it might roll up and draw all of him in through it like a huge swirling drain.

Spock sat back in his chair and took several deep breaths. He’d always had a secret feeling that he wasn’t real at all, that he was some sort of theoretical something. sometimes, when there was no one else at home, he wondered if he might just fade away.

The computer was sluggish. No. that wasn’t right. Father said that it was illogical to blame the computer for one’s own shortcomings. A machine could only do what it was told to do - mo more. Sometimes Mother said that Father’s console didn’t like her - “ she won’t work for me, Sarek.” “You think it is female, my wife?” “What else? She’s terribly jealous of me.”

That was all very illogical of course. Father always scolded Mother about it but not as if he expected her to change her behavior even the slightest. If she were logical, Father would tell her so in compliment, and she would say, ‘don’t you get fresh with me,” and pretend to be mad at him. Spock had come to the conclusion that grown people, even Vulcans, did not always make a great deal of sense.

He shouldn’t give up. Father would say that one must persevere if he was to find his answers. There might be an error in input or a glitch in the system that might make the results show non sequitur. Maybe that was it.

 

Spock asked the computer to show him his programming, and he went through it line by line, word by word. Everything seemed in order. He ran it again. Zero probability.

And he ran it again. Zero probability. Back through the programming, recreating his reasoning all in his mind. He ran it again. And again

It had to be the program. He pulled off the back of his console and stared at the components through the clear-view and could see nothing out of line, none of its few moving parts hesitating or catching on each other. Sinse? That was a huge bank with numbers of professional online at all hours. If there was something wrong at that end, they’d know it, have the repair staff on it, and post out-of-order messages all through the system in a sixth of a besa at most. It had to be his program.

He’d rewrite it. Pull the old program off and recreate the whole thing and then check his data before he plugged in in. Maybe he shouldn’t plug anything in. Maybe he should write in all of the data as he went, reasoning everything together in steps and then running the whole thing...

“You are certainly working with alacrity today.”

Spock whirled in his chair to face his father who stood in the door to his bedroom with hands folded in front of him. He hoped that his body was blocking the computer screen but all of a sudden he felt so tiny. 

Father walked toward him, his robe swishing. Father always wore robes that made a noise when he walked.

“Running and rerunning the same program, rewriting the program from scratch...”

FAther leaned down to look at the screen, resting one of his big warm hands on Spock’s shoulder.

“...quite an industrious young man today.” The hand went up and down several times before the fingers gripped his should and pushed. “Turn around here and let me see what the problem might be.”

Spock relaxed. If Father had been at his own terminal, he could have easily seen what information was being pulled through it. He’d forgotten about that. Father knew exactly what program he had been trying to run, and he did not seem to think that Spock’s interest had been a breach of privacy.

“Once you have run a program several times and have found it to produce results that you know in fact are incorrect, you must begin to assume that perhaps it is not that you have erred in your programming, but that perhaps you have left something out or that your original approach as somewhat askew. Now, explain to me what data you have entered.”

Spock started to kist the variables that he’d used, but Father made him stop.

“No, Spock. I want you t to tell me why you entered that particular data.”

So he explained that he had included all of his family data and the basic probability factors and the biochemical analyses of both Vulcans and Terrans to provide the computer with as much specific information about the case as possible.

“Where did you obtain the biochemical analyses, my son?”

“From my biology text.”

He started to reach for the tape but felt the hand tighten on his shoulder. “Are you certain that is the source you wish to use?”

Father was right. It was only a secondary school book. A medical book would have been better. He suggested this to Father.

“Why a medical text, my son?”

“It would have more detail, more specific analyses on the chemical composition of cells and blood types.”

“The cells and blood types of whom?”

“The typical Vulcan and Terran genotypes.”

“And is that what you want? The typical types?”

Spock looked up at his father and found him with eyebrows raised.

Typical types? But he wasn’t crossing all Vulcans to all Terrans, or even all Vulcan men to all Terran women. He was looking for his mother and father’s offspring.

“Do you have analyses I can use?

Father reached over his shoulders and keyed in a sequence. The had to wait a few moments before the data came up and, when it did, it was on a split screen so that he could watch the both at the same time - Mother on the left, Father on the right.

 

“Run your program, son.”

Spock went through the sequence that had already wearied on his fingers, but this time almost immediately the viable genotypic crosses began to come up and, as he had suspected, they were slightly more than average in favor of males.

“They will be in abbreviated analysis, Spock,” his father explained, tapping on a couple of keys himself, “unless you ask for detailed breakdowns.”

Spock nodded, noticing one in highlight. He craned his neck to see his father’s face.

“Is that...me?”

“It is.”

Watching the possible crosses list was odd, knowing that even though there were quite a number of them, normal cross analyses yielded millions of possibilities. It was even odder to stare at that one brightly shining improbability and know that it represented all that he was.

“I see the error in my reasoning,” he told his father. “I didn’t think that specific types were necessary.”

“Neither did I.”

“You - “

“Yes, son. We made the same mistake, you and I. No one truly has ‘textbook physiology’. It did not occur to me at first that your mother and I might be far enough away from our ‘typical’ racial biochemistries to make viable crosses possible. It was a surprise to the biochemists, that is certain.”

“How did you discover the error?”

Father put a hand on Spock’s neck and thumbed his jaw “You were born.”

Nine

The best thing about waiting for the baby was shopping for it. At first, it was just going to be father, Grandfather, and dai-uncle Lu-ki, but at the last minute his uncle couldn’t go and Spock got to be one of the men and go along to help.

“Hurry, son. The limousine is waiting.”

Grandfather had walked over with Aunt Dor-hu to bring a plant to Mother and was waiting in the hallway while Spock put on a street robe. It was the yellow one that had a short fold almost like a convenience pleat, and when he wore his white day cloak and sandals with it, he looked nearly twelve years old.

Just as they were leaving, Mother called from the hallway.

“Sarek! Have you gone yet?”

“No, Amanda. We are still here.”

“Good!” She was still in the meditation room with Aunt Dor-hu. “Promise me you won’t spend more than your allowance.”

Spock waited for his father to answer, but he didn’t. Mother had to call again.

“Sarek, did you hear me?”

“Yes, Amanda. I heard you.”

“All right, dear! Have a good time!”

They went quickly form the house then, leaving Spock puzzled. “Pardon, Father, but you didn’t actually make your promise to Mother.”

Father and Grandfather exchanged secret glances and Grandfather leaned in close. “The boy learns quickly,” he said to Father’s knowing nod, and they got into the limousine.

o0o

It was pleasant shopping with Father and Grandfather. They didn’t look at a single house catalogue - they went in and out of a hundred small shops (now that was an exaggeration, of course, but that was exactly how it seemed) and picked things up in their hands and looked them over carefully.

One thing they looked at was slings. Father explained that they had to last thirty months of carrying and hanging and tethering outside shops until a baby was old enough to come when its father called. He hadn’t known that there was a time when a baby wasn’t supposed to obey.

“Here is one that converts,” Grandfather said and held up a sling with straps hanging from it. Father looked it over, detaching the tethers and folding and unfolding parts. “You know, Sarek, I still have the one you used for Spock that you gave me for your brother. It’s almost new.”

Father was shaking his head. “No. This baby will have her own things.”

 

They went then to a shop that had imports form the Forest lands and looked over the baby clothes. Each compound had its own section and none of the pieces was exactly like the others. Father selected several things with Grandfather’s help and had them sent out to the limousine. The bad thing about shopping with a limousine was that people would stare at you. They tried to make it look as if they were looking the other way, but they were staring. 

Grandfather looked down into the storage compartment and shook his head. “Your wife is never going to believe that you kept within your budget, Sarek.”

“Perhaps...”

“Amanda is not dimwitted.”

“Perhaps there was a sale...”

 

Grandfather didn’t believe that and Mother wouldn’t either. Father sent Spock back into the shop for the receipts and, while he was there, he saw something he hadn’t before. Among all the tiny baby shirts and diaper covers, there was a soft green robe of smoothly shining material with tiny little beads worked in scallops up and down the front. It wasn’t made like a baby’s robe at all because it ended at the waist and had a skirted bottom like an academy uniform. It was beautiful.

“Spock, come along.”

“I found something, Father. Come and see.”

He held it up, protective covering and all, so that Father could see. Grandfather came in and he showed it to him as well.

“I would like to buy this for Mother’s baby,” he stated and so firmly that it would be known what his intention was. He had been told in the limousine that he could select items for the baby if he wished, and he wished to select this one.

“It is not very practical.”

That was Grandfather. He could use and re-use and recycle anything you could think of. Mother liked to challenge him with odd bits and pieces of things and exotic objects for him to refashion into something else.

The shop-owner had walked over to where they were standing and agreed with jGrandfather. “You are quite correct, h’daarin. We carry such items as these to display some of the fine work that is done by this household. It serves its purpose in catching the attention of customers. If you would like to see what can be done on formal wear , might I direct you to this display?”

She gestured toward the opposite wall, but Spock held firm. “My mother is to have a baby in some months, h’daar and I would like to purchase this robe.”

The woman looked to Father for agreement. “I have my own money, h’daar.”

 

And he did. Every week his mother would give him an amount of money to spend as he liked. this was separate from the household accounts which paid for his tuition, school uniforms, and books, as well as for his athletic equipment and clothes. The orders were that he was to se this money for his own entertainment and that no one would be allowed to tell him how he could use it.

“You will note, Child, the price of this robe is somewhat high.”

“Yes.” Spock agreed. “It is too high to sell.” He caught a ripple from the shop-owner that surprised and pleased him at the same time. “You, yourself have said that it is too impractical and that it is used by your shop primarily to attract attention. I would, however, be willing to rid you of this relatively useless item for a reduced price.”

After the silence, there followed a great amount of discussion wherein Spock attempted to convince the shop-owner that he had taken a mild fancy to the robe but was not so taken by it as to spend outrageously for it. The woman tried to catch him in his strategy by pointing out that an infant, indeed, would have no use for such a garment.

“On the contrary, h’daar,” Spock told her, “our father is a t’yetma and it is often that we will be required to accompany him on missions where there are receptions of formal proportions. The child will have to be dressed accordingly.”

The shop-owner was not very smooth, and Spock knew that he had won even before the agreement was made. As he signed for it, he looked up, stylus in hand, and said exactly as his father would, “And would you wrap it in janisn as a gift?”

Outside in the car, Grandfather let out a breath that he had been holding and released his surprise. “I could hardly believe what I was hearing in there, my boy.”

 

Maybe he had been rude or disrespectful. He asked and was told that he had not. “Not at all, but I would not have expected such cleverness of a boy your age, even if he is my grandson. Sarek, this child should be on the council with you in a few short years.”

Grandfather knew that he would be at the science academy when he was twenty-one, but it was Grandfather’s way of saying that Spock was like his father and complimenting him on it. Father looked down at the package Spock was holding on his lap.

“So, that is your gift for your mother’s baby?”

“Yes.” He ran a hand over the silky fabric wrapping with its corded ties. “I thought that, perhaps, the baby could wear it to its naming.” He looked down at the package again. “I suppose it is very impractical.”

“But not for a naming.” Father looked at him with soft eyes. He had grown so used to them he couldn’t imagine never seeing them looking that way again. “A naming is an important event in one’s life. And such a garment is of the sort to be passed down through the family as an heirloom. And I expect that someday, your own child will wear it at her naming.”

Now it was time for Spock to be surprised. Grandfather was sitting on the oppositeseat adjusting a sandal. “He has some years until that, though. A quarter-century?”

He would have children someday. All men had families. That made him think of T’Pring. It was Pring still. Somehow though, she made him think of her as T’Pring because she had seemed to him so logical and smooth for seven. She had been so cool when they had seen each other and he had been so... nervous.

That made him think of something else. His babies would be part Terran, too.

They stopped to have a meal on one side of the park and they talked about the new baby. Or Father and Grandfather did. They reminded themselves of all the troubles that babies gave them and also things that babies did that charmed them. Sometimes, it was difficult to tell which was which. Spock listened to them without asking a lot of questions. He had always found that you could learn more that way. eventually, the talking turned to politics and he got restless.

“Yes, my son?”

“They’re selling ices across the concourse.”

Before he could make a logical argument, Father had handed him a handful of coins and sent him on his way. It was more than he needed. He bought his ice and peered through the plastic windows at the brew-and-pastry shop next door while he ate it.

“May I assist you, child?”

He bought two with nuts and one with a sweet chaktai filling and headed back to the table.

Near the cafe was a footwear shop and three babies had been left outside. Two were slung form the hanging bar and were fast asleep. A third one was old enough to be tethered and was making noises to itself. Some one had given it a bath sponge to play with, and it was amusing itself by waving it about and chewing on it. Sometimes Father and Mother bought sandals here. Spock wondered if he had ever been hung here when he was little.

Suddenly the baby went wild, squealing and bouncing and throwing the sponge too far for it to reach. It started to howl. Spock hurried over and, balancing the pastries in the crook of one arm, he picked up the sponge and gave it to the baby. 

“Here, baby. Don’t fuss,” he said, and patted its tiny head.

Any minute its father would appear to quiet it. The baby stopped its howling when it had the sponge in its mouth. It didn’t say thank you or anything like that of course, but it looked up at Spock with wet eyes as it sucked on its sponge. It held up its arms to him, but Spock had to get back to his table. He had been gone too long already.

“You certainly know how she reacts to such things by now.”

Spock sat down and placed each pastry in its proper plate. They didn’t know he was there.

“You treat that wife of yours with entirely too much delicacy, Sarek. Women are strong for this very purpose.”

“You forget,” Father said, “that Amanda is an Earth woman. She is tender in ways that a Vulcan woman is not.”

“You aren’t intending to attend to her as before...”

“It is my intention.”

Grandfather shook his head and dug through the skatn bowl for the burnt pieces.

“Sarek, Sarek...”

 

Grandfather was scolding. It was odd to hear someone scolding FAther.

“...is this the way I have raised you? To interfere in the ways of women?”

“And would I not be turning from my training if I were not to remain at the side of she who is my wife, even if it is to hold back the discomfort of the bearing?”

“”The birthing chamber is no place for a man, even if his wife calls for him and the midwife is illogical enough to bring him in. He is not prepared or instructed to see t her needs in this way.”

“I see.” Father’s eyebrows went up halfway and stayed there. Grandfather was near to trouble. “And was my wife prepared and instructed to see to my needs? And did she not remain at my side nevertheless?”

Yes? Spock was waiting. If they kept on talking he would understand what they were saying. The birthing chamber was women’s secrets, but Grandfather was saying that Father knew of it! And Father was not denying it!

But just then, Grandfather noticed the pastry on his plate and looked up to find Spock sitting there. He wasn’t really spying; they had just forgotten that he was with them. With one nod of his head, he and father began talking about people in Grandfather’s family that Spock didn’t even know. It was more interesting to read the labels on the table spices.

o0o

Aunt Dor-hu was still there when they got back. Mother had been sick and Aunt Dor-mi had been called. “It started shortly after you left. I thought her stomach would never empty.”

“I warned you, Dor-hu, to be gentle with her. Sometimes you forget that Amanda is not Vulcan.”

“I do not forget, Sarek. Certainly you must know that I would never cause pain or discomfort to my spirit-sister except that which is necessary to the toning, nor would I presume...”

Father had to stop her or she would go on forever. “What did Dor-mi say and why has she gone? Amanda in in her fifth month. The nausea should be gone by now.”

Aunt Dor-hu shook her head as if she was surprised at what Father had said. “Just as each woman is different, Sarek, each pregnancy is different. She is to stay in her bed the rest of the day and have fluids until tomorrow. That is what our sister ordered. She has other patients, you remember.”

Father noticed Spock standing amid their purchased from the city and sent him off to put them in the room they used for guests. When he was finished, he found his aunt gone and his father in the kitchen pulling packages from the shelves.

“I could make Mother some plomik soup,” Spock volunteered.

“I have some here, so,” Father told him, holding up an envelope of crystals that, when wet, would turn into something like plomik soup.

“But I could make it real.”

Father didn’t like plomik soup. He didn’t like eating it, he didn’t like looking at it, and he didn’t like cooking it.

“What I mean is, I can make it fresh for her. We had plomik and uda come in just yesterday, and you told me that mother should be careful what she eats so that the baby will be healthy.”

He didn’t say how MOther sneaked chocolates when Father wasn’t looking or how she poured her iron supplement down the sink. Mother had made him eat chocolates, too, so that he was just as guilty as she was.

Father agreed but he watched Spock the whole time, scrutinizing everything he put into the pot, questioning a few additions with his eyes. Father knew how to make plomik soup by the known formula and he could make it so that it was edible and so that it tasted something like plomik, but Spock knew how to make it so that people were not simply polite when they ate it.

Well, actually, he knew how to make it in theory, for his grandfather had often enlisted him to help in the preparation in his household, sharing with him his own private formula for certain dishes, just as he shared them with Mother. He knew that the plomik formula was a secret though, and he would tell no one just how one went about it, even Father.

Spock used some of his mother’s secret herb mixtures so that it was difficult to tell at a distance just what spices were used. Father was boiling something for their dinner while Spock made Mother’s and was watching him so carefully that at one point he burned his hand. While Father was running his fingers under the water, Spock seized the opportunity to pinch some shaka root powder and throw it into the soup.

Father allowed him to help serve the meal. Mother was still in the midst of her nap when they reacher her room, and Spock watched his father bring her slowly from sleep, drawing his fingertips gently across her forehead. With her eyes closed and her face so soft-looking and her hair tumbled around her, she looked more like a girl from T’Penon’s preparatory school than a teacher and his mother. Just now, she didn’t look like his mother at all.

People said things about her being too young to be his mother when they thought that he wasn’t listening like they had at the picnic. Vulcan women didn’t have children until they were at least thirty-five years old, but Mother had explained to him once that Earth women were different. People said other things about his mother and father and about their having him, but those things he did not like to think about.

With a soft sound, is mother was awake. His father caught her hand as it reached up and patted it gently. “Spock and I are here with your meal, my wife. Let me help you sit up.”

“Really, Sarek. I’m not an invalid,” she said in an angry tone which didn’t stop him form tucking cushions in behind her back nor rearranging the blanket. He turned back to get the tray.

“I have it, Father.”

His father waved him forward, and he set the tray across his mother’s blanketed knees. He’d only spilled one drop of soup and no one would notice it.

“Thank you, dear.”

Then he and his father stood back and watched as she lifgted her spoon, dipped it into the bowl, and brought it to her mouth. Then she stopped, spoon in mid-air. 

“Excuse me”, she said with a little laugh, ‘but I’ve never eaten before an audience before.”

Sarek waved Spock away and started backing toward the door himself. 

“Oh, I was only kidding,” she said. “Con on back.” She patted the bed. “Just no raised eyebrows while I am trying to eat.”

And with that, both sets went up. Spock glanced at his father at the very same moment his father was looking at him and in that moment while they stood there looking at each other in embarrassment, Mother took a spoonful of soup.

“Mmmm...oh!”

Her empty spoon was in the air and her eyes were squeezed shut as if she had tasted something wonderful.

“It pleases you then, my wife?” his father said when he discovered the cause for the outcry. She couldn’t reply at first because she had another spoonful in her mouth, but when she cold, she made all sorts of pleased sounds and compliments about the cook. 

“This... this is absolutely delicious! This has got to be the best plomik soup I’ve ever tasted in my life!” She looked straight at Father with a suspicious glare. “You didn’t make this.”

“You are quite correct, my wife. It was your son and heir who managed such a feat.”

“Spock!” She held out her hand to him. “Dear, how did you learn to do this?”

“By watching you and Grandfather at New Years.”

“Neither your grandfather nor I ever got plomik to taste like this. What did you do to it?”

Spock held his breath for a moment. “It’s actually a secret.”

His mother laughed, not the least bit offended. “Well, we must keep it a secret, then.”

That was something Vulcan she truly understood.

o0o

Ten

 

Mother got bigger all of a sudden. In another week, she had to put away most of her usual robes and wear some others that Spock had never seen before. Two of the things Father had bought that day of shopping were a new robe for Mother and something like a split-robe from the import store. When he gave them to her, it looked like she might crowd close to him , but instead she just smiled and held his hand until he made her go into another room and try them on.

Mother was very curious about Spock’s present. She tried to get him to tell but, since he had sworn Father and Grandfather to secrecy on the subject, she could not find out. She bothered him for a little while and then decided to respect his wishes. He wanted Mother to open it after his sister was born.

o0o

And Mother got bigger still. And still there were more than two long Vulcan months to go. The weather got hotter and MOther complained about it, and how hard the cusions were, and Father had to rub her back a lot. Sometimes she’ld squirm in her chair as if someone had pinched her, and sometimes she ate things that made Spock sick just to think of them, but all these things were to be expected, Father said, and Spsock tried to help out as best he could.

It wasn’t always easy. Suddenly there were a dozen things that Mother needed at once and Spock had to run for them. Father didn’t want her to move around endlessly in the heat, but she insisted on finishing her paper for MRI and her reference tapes were left all over the house. Outings that they had planned had to be cancelled or postponed because Mother was tired or her ankles were full of fluid. Every time Mother moved even just to reach for something, Father’s eyes darted to catch her.

“One must always pay attention to a woman in this condition,” Father explained to him, “although one must not draw attention to any difficulty she may be having except among close family.”

Spock listened closely and carefully to this.

“You will understand as you are older that women do not like to admit that they are uncomfortable or tired or ill at this time. They want their men to think them capable of carrying on their duties with the same energy as before. We allow them to maintain their illusion.”

And that wasn’t easy either. If you tried to help Mother too much, she would snap at you. Once, when Father was trying to organize her notes for her, Mother pushed him away, saying, “Sarek, you’re going to drive me right out of my mind if you don’t stop hovering. Will you please go somewhere else and leave me alone?”

Father said nothing until he had drawn Spock from the room. Then he inclined his head slightly toward him and said, “you will also note that when a woman is efa lir, she is often likely to be irritable, especially with males. The common practice is to behave as if nothing was ever said.”

There certainly were a lot of deferences to be paid a woman having a baby. If he had talked to Father like that, he would have been in more trouble than Surak on the Forge.

o0o

There was a date circled in red on the calendar on Mother’s wardrobe door - the eigth of I’Api - that marked the day that Father would be seventy-eight years old and the date that Courtenay Jaquith was going to arrive. It was only the first of Mundots - still weeks of waiting and running and preparing left to go. Father and Grandfather talked of nothing else.

Sepek and Noiard came over to play basketball. When the ball had come from Earth, Mother had laughed at it as if it were a joke, but Father had dutifully climbed up with a plastic data-tape ring and attached it to the overhang above the pavement in the rear garden and Mother had taught him to play. Noiard wasn’t very good at it though and got bored after a while and went to talk to Father who had brought out the components of one of his data enhancers to work on them in the sunlight.

Father let Noiard hand him his tools which was about all she could do because she didn’t understand computers very well, and it seemed from where he was standing that Father had to explain what the names of some of the instruments were. Spock was so busy trying to watch them that he got hit in the head with the basketball. 

“Wake up, Spock!” You’re sleeping on your feet!”

Even now that they were friends, Spock never knew quite how to take comments like those from Sepek.

“I’m thirsty,” Spock said and headed for the servitor. Mother came out of the house to see what was going on and Noiard went to talk with her. The servitor wouldn’t serve and Spock had to fiddle with it. 

“They’re building down near the school,” Sepek told him. “Let’s slip out while Noiaad’s not looking and go watch.”

“We can’t do that, Sepek. It’s not polite.”

“She’s too little, Spock. If we take here, we’ll have to lift her up to see over the barrier. Besides,” he said, nodding in Noiard’s direction, “she won’t even notice. Look.”

Mother had taken a seat on the lawn sofa and Noiard was rubbing one of her feet between her hands. Father had left his enhancer and was standing over her with great interest. Spock strained to catch what they were saying.

“...the same when Tumisi’s mother was carrying him. some of the women did this for her and it helped.”

Sepek nudged him in the back. “When is that baby coming anyway?”

“I’Api.”

 

Sepek shook his head. “My grandmother says Earth women can tell before what it is, a girl or a boy.”

“Not my mother,” Spock admitted , although he didn’t know why not. “I hope it’s a girl, though,’ he told Sepek.

“You want it to be a girl?”

“Sure. Mother says she doesn’t care, and Father wants it to be.”

“That’s sure.”

Sepek said it with an exaggerated nod that told Spock there was more.

“What do you mean?”

“My father used to take me lots of places and bring me things. Then he got an heir. Now all he does is show people his filiation papers and tell about what a superior woman her mother is. And everyone’s always asking him ‘how’s the little chief?’ Nobody ever says that about me.”

“Well, your sister’s new, Sepek. People are always fussing over babies.”

“She’s almost four,” Sepek reminded him. “And it gets worse. Soon they get robed like Penon and you have to call them T’ -something-or-other and pay deferences to them because they’re becoming women. Then they can really chief you about.”

Sepek shot a quick and dirty look toward the sofa. Spock’s father had gotten down beside Noiard in the sand and had Mother’s other foot in his hands, trying to copy what Noiard was doing.

“Believe me, Spock. Once your father gets an heir, he won’t have time for you anymore.”

Father would have time for him. Father told him whenever he had a particularly difficult lesson to learn that, even so, it was Father’s duty to teach him because Spock eas his son And Father was always pleased with his progress - well, maybe he didn’t used to be, but that was a long time ago when he was very young. Father siad that there would be special lessons coming for his robing, but that wasn’t until he was fourteen. Those were special man’s lessons - almost like women’s secrets only somehow, it seemed, Mother knew them.

He wondered how they could truly be secrets if women knew of them. And what kind of secrets could men have? They didn’t mingle seed or carry babies or anything terribly exciting or mysterious like that.

Something else occurred to Spock just then. If Father did get an heir and if he did become involved in her training, who would train him? Other boys had uncles or grandfathers, but his uncle was only a little boy and his grandfather was a Mountain clanner. And Mother. If Mother were to take up his training, what kind of odd lessons would she require him to learn?

He and Sepek ducked out to watch the builders, but he didn’t enjoy any of it, anticipating the reprimand he would receive when he returned home for discourtesy toward his guest. For three days afterward, Spock tried to make up for it by being extra helpful around the house, but Sepek had been right. It would be rather bothersome to have someone small with you all the time that you had to look after and boost up to see things. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t made such a fuss over the cradle being in his room.

o0o

Aunt Dor-hu was over more often now. Before the baby was coming, she came by on Club days to go with Mother, but now she was over three or four times a week. They even went to the Club more often now.

“You truly must be at the peak of condition, you know,” Aunt Dor-hu said as she and Mother headed into the meditation chamber to do their exercises. “Every muscle must be stretched, toned, and controllable or - well, you remember what happened to you last time. You Earth women! I don’t see how you manage at all.”

When the door closed, Spock could still hear Aunt Dor-hu talking. She went on and on like that, talking forever until someone , usually dai-Uncle Lu-ki projected to her the idea that someone else wanted to speak. But Aunt Dor-hu was hsis favorite. She taught him how to dance with her just as if he were a grown man and not just a little boy.

Spock found Father in the kitchen pulling components out of the slow oven. He sat up witn an assembly in his hand, the lubricant running down over his fingers like caveberry sauce. Spock stood by, quietly watching, until Father tired of his silence.

“Yes, son?”

“May I help you?”

“If you would. There is a rg just over there.”

He got it and held it so that Father could wipe his hands.

“Thank you, son.”

“You’re welcome, Father.”

They looked at each other for a moment with their eyebrows up until Father gestured to his wrench and Spock handed it to him.

“Where is your mother?”

“She’s with Aunt Dor-hu in the meditation room. They’ve closed the door.”

Father nodded and began tightening something inside the oven.

“What do you think they do in there? Aunt Dor-hu comes so often now.”

“I do not know, Spock, and you will not ask them.”

Women’s secrets. He knew it. It happened every time.

“Don’t men do anything to prepare for a baby?”

He realized after he’d said it that he sounded complaining and whining. Father didn’t comment on that though.

“A father’s duty comes after the birth when he cares for and trains the infant.”

“Diapers.”

“Yes.” Father didn’t look at him but he knew that he was amused. “And baths and dressing and feedings in the middle of the night. Oh - “

Father’s face came out of the oven and nodded to him, “- and teeth cutting at all hours. There are twenty of those and most often, they erupt one at a time, so that the entire affair is stretched out over several months of fretting and fussing.”

“How long do the diapers last?” Spock asked. That was the worst part of it he thought.

“Approximately two years.”

“Two years!”

“Or more.”

Two years? He’d thought maybe one or two months of it would be difficult enough. Father was looking at him in a way that he knew was good for asking bothersome questions.

“Don’t mothers ever help with diapers and that sort of thing?”

“Of course they do, Spock. But it is in helping the men with their duty.”

“But why is it men’s duty?”

He didn’t understand it at all. Women had all deference, all respect, all honor. Then when they had a baby, everyone had to rush about and make them comfortable. Fathers only assisted at the beginning of it and, from what he could tell, it only took a little time to manage it. It was more the mother’s baby than it was the father’s. And nobody made a fuss of him even though he had to do all the messy part of it.

Father was looking at him with careful, thoughtful eyes. “Spock...”

The lightness was gone. Something had changed the air. Father drew a breath and held it for a long time before he let it go.

“...you are very difficult.”

“I don’t mean to be.”

 

Father shook his head. “It is not something that you can help. It is that you are wrong in years.”

People said things about his age that he did not understand but that made him uneasy still. His age was always wrong.

“You are a bright boy, Spock. If you were seven, there would be nothing to say. If you were fourteen, you would be robed and the customary discussions already taken place. The fact exists that you are ten years of age and must be told something. Come...”

Father closed the oven panel and got to his feet, indicating that Spock should follow. They went into the dining lounge where the lights were low and sat in Father’s couch.

“To answer your question, let me tell you a woman’s duty. When the time is right, a woman may conceive and carry a child - this is a woman’s choice and not a man’s. He has no say here. A woman does not do this thing against her will, nor does her husband, if honorable , badger her to agreement - but more of this later.

“She carries the child within her body for seven months at which time she gives it birth and then nourishes it for three months more. That is the custom - one year of sustaining. When that time is up, she may choose to nurture it further - as your mother with you - or she may give it up fully to the father’s care. But in all this time, before it is born and after, a baby draws strength from its mother for she gives it life - her own life - so that it may grow and thrive.”

“Her own life?”

His father was silent for a moment. They sat next to each other, side by side, but Father seemed somehow far away.

“You have heard the expression ‘to give life’? Estimations vary, and some peoples - Terrans included - deny or will not believe it, but it is known that any sentient mammalian female loses for each child she beings forth a year of her own life.”

Father had struck him, in his quiet words, a blow so hard and sharp that his breath was stolen away. 

“Why?” He wasn’t certain that he had spoken the word aloud. “Why would a woman allow this to happen?”

“It is the way of women, to be courageous enough to do this thing. No woman is forced. She chooses to give life, just as she may choose not to give life. A man, knowing this, is willing to discharge his duty, knowing that his part could never be equal to a woman’s sacrifice, but doing what he can. When a man knows the woman’s price, can he complain if he must wake in the night to soothe a teething infant? Or give up a part of his leisure to see to its cleaning? Or see his career not move forward quite as quickly as he would wish? No. Not if he is a man of logic and honor, he cannot.?

‘Grandmother.”

“What?”

“Grandmother,” He saw her in his mind, clear as the water in a bathing pool. “Grandmother died when I was barely seven. She would still be alive.”

“Your grandmother was killed in an accident, Spock. It is not the same.”

His mind was flying in stutters, making connections and tying off leads. This made him quick, people said, but just now, it made him sick.

“Is...before, when you said that I owed Mother a debt that I could never repay, is this what you meant?”

“It is the way of life, Spock, and it cannot be changed. You owe your mother in the same way that your uncle and I owe our mother, your grandmother And as our fathers did before us.”

But that was wrong. Father had left part of it out. “But that’s not all, FAther. There are Aunt Dor-hu and Dor-mi...”

“No. No, Spock. It is different for them. Your aunts are women. They can put back into the world that which they take. Can you see that?”

“Because they can ‘give life’?”

Father nodded. Then, without another word about it, he got up from the couch and left him to his own he got up from the couch and left him to his own thoughts. Spock sat alone for a long time.

Eleven

Mother and Father had a diplomatic thing to go to at the Cygnetian Embassy, and Ambassador Rosenberg and his wife were picking them up on the way. Mother was complaining about how nothing fit her anymore, and Father had a new robe to wear to these affairs instead of his ambassadorial suit and was complaining to Mother about the scratchiness of the underpinning. Spock was loitering about the open door.

“Will you hold still, Sarek?”

“The chemise is caught between...”

“I know where it is, if you’ll just...”

 

She reached inside to pull his under-robe down and she must have scratched him because Father jumped when she tugged.

At first, it seemed that Father was going to scold, but in a moment he turned away and then looked back with his eyes down. That made Mother smile and kiss him. Spock wasn’t supposed to see that - the kiss . She made it on Father’s face, down near his jaw. People made kisses on their mouths, too. He knew that from watching films that made Mother cry whenever they had to travel on a star-liner for the Federation council. It was an Earth thing. Sometimes, when she thought he was asleep, Mother made a kiss on his face, too.

Spock slipped from the doorway so that Father wouldn’t know he had seen. If Spock didn’t know, Father could pretend that it hadn’t happened. Sometimes Mother forgot herself when it was just the two of them, and Father thought it was best to ignore such incidents rather than upset her by pointing out the indiscretion. Usually, father was very clever at pointing out indiscretions.

 

The chimes were ringing. Ambassador Rosenberg burst into the vronsin, messing up Spock’s hair with one hand and pounding on the open door with the other. “Open up! This is the Vice Squad!”

Mother came down the hallway laughing with Father close behind. The Earth ambassador threw up his hands and pointed at her round stomach. “Oh, my God! I’m too late!”

“Paul, please.” Barbara was shushing him, but she was laughing , too. She saw Spock standing there and bent down to look him in the eye. He didn’t like her perfume. “I’ll bet you can’t wait ‘til this baby comes, can you?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Lots of times outworlders asked questions when they really didn’t want answers. And sometimes it was even better that way.

“Spock are you all right?”

Mother was peering at him now. He tried not to look straight into her eyes.

“I think my stomach is sick,” he said truthfully and waited patiently while Father felt his face and neck. 

“There is no fever, Amanda. I think we have both eaten a few too many gorspn, have we not?”

They gave him a dose of the stomach medicine and put him to bed. they didn’t even give him his juice before they left. he waited until he heard the limousine szzz into the night and got up to get his own. He wasn’t a baby.

o0o

His stomach still felt strange in the morning but Father didn’t think he was sick enough and sent him to school anyway. There was no one in the yard to talk to - Sepek was traveling with his father to the family shrine to make an offering for his sister, and Noiard still wasn’t speaking to him because of the other day. 

He didn’t care. She had been tagging after him too often lately, and pretty soon people would start calling them playmates. She had just been getting in the way anyway, making Father have to explain everything he was doing and having to eat markes that could have choked a selat. Tomorrow he and Father were going to repair a climate control system and he would be a help to Father.

He could help Mother, too. When Father took blood for an analysis that night, Spock held her hand and reassured her that he didn’t think she was a coward because she cried ouch ouch when the needle went in and squeezed his hand tight. He could even learn to rub her back and her feet for her and make her comfortable.

Spock was with Father when he ran the analysis and later when he made a call. Sometimes, Father let him use the scanner.

“Is it normal?” he asked when Father got off the visicom. 

Father told him no. 

“However, it is what it should be, or rather, what it has to be,” Father explained. “As the time draws near, your mother will need more frequent monitoring.”\\\”What could happen?”

Father ejected the blood sample from the scanner and went to store it.

“A woman’s body must maintain a delicate balance during gestation. If the chemistry is too much disturbed, the child could suffer.”

Father was closing down the scanner. Spock didn’t know anyone else who had such equipment in their own house. It used to belong to Grandmother until she died. Aunt Dor-mi had quarreled with Father over it, but Father was Grandmother’s heir and he won. Father usually won arguments if they weren’t with Mother. Even Grandfather, who could scold him, couldn’t make Father obey if he didn’t want to. Like when they were shopping and FAther had said he would hold back MOther’s discomfort.

He had heard right. The baby might hurt Mother being born. That was what Father meant when he said he must ‘prevent Amanda’s discomfort.” Discomfort meant a dull ache or a little pinch. Father wouldn’t go against tradition for that. And he had been able to tell by his lifted chin that Father was speaking of something much larger, much worse.

Whenever he’d thought about it before, he sort of thought that when the mother was ready, she’d just drop the baby out. What would Father do if the baby hurt Mother? He wouldn’t tolerate anyone’s hurting Mother.

 

Spock lowered the dustcover of the scanner and fastened it down. He had just thought of something he hadn’t before. He had been Mother’s baby once, tiny and still and growing inside of her until it was time for him to come out. Had he hurt his mother when he was born?

o0o

Mother’s baby was just six weeks from being born, but she had invited the whole of Grandmother’s household to dinner and intended to spend the entire day preparing for it. He and Father were supposed to serve it and do the cleaning afterward, but earlier in the day they had to check that malfunctioning climate control system at a house of one of his business associates who lived several courts away. Actually, Father was the one who had been asked to see to it, but Spock was going along as assistant. It was all planned and agreed to. Then Mother did something foolish.

The chaka scraper was in a high cupboard. Father had put it there after New Years because the only time anyone took the trouble to do their own scraping was at the breaking of fast when there was a ceremony to go with it. Well, Mother decided to take the trouble, and when Father found her, she was on her knees on the counter, clinging for her life to the cupboard door.

Spock thought there might be a fight. Father grabbed Mother around the back and behind the knees and swung her down, startling her so badly that she yelled at him.

“That decides it, my wife. You cannot be trusted alone in the house.”

“Don’t you start in on me again, Sarek T’Pirikan, or I swear to God I’ll go to Earth and have this baby in a hospital!”

It seemed to Spock that Father’s arms got even tighter around Mother.

“You will do no such thing, Amanda. My daughter will not be born in a place where there are people who are ill.”

“Just who is having this baby, I’d like to know? I can’t go out in the sun, I can’t go sands-sledding, I can’t have chocolates, you won’t even...”

“Amanda, you are making a scene.”

With that, he set her down on her feet and straightened her robe.

“You’re making me make a scene.”

WhenMother began with that sort of reasoning, there was no winning. Usually when she did though, her face got pink like an udz stalk and her cheeks pinker still. Just now she looked grey like a caveberry vine.

Father stepped back with his hands folded in front of him. “Perhaps we should be on our way.”

They left Mother alone in the kitchen and Father got his tools. They got all the way to the cloak cupboard and Father was reaching in for his work apron before he said anything.

“When I go, Spock, you will go back to the kitchen and offer your assistance to your mother.”

“But I was going to assist you.”

“Yes.” He folded the work apron and tucked it into his carrybag. “I have been too careful of your mother these past weeks, but it is so difficult for a man to know how much protection to render without causing this sort of rebellious behavior. You will have to stay and keep watch here if I am going to keep my promise.”

Father looked down at him with a warning eye.

“It is not her Terran nature which makes her so, Spock. A Vulcan woman can be much worse. Some day you will see that for yourself.”

It was settled then. Father gave him instructions - he was to offer his assistance and be there to climb and stoop if ingredients and equipment were out of the way.

There would be no compromise. Sometimes, if he were good enough in his reasoning and in his approach, he could sway his father in decisions. Mother was much easier or harder, depending upon how you considered. You couldn’t outsmart her, but if you said, ‘all the other children are doing it’, you had a very good chance of getting your own way.

When Mother saw him back in the kitchen, she was suspicious.

“I stayed to help you, Mother.”

“Did your father put you up to this?”

He wished she wouldn’t do that. vulcans didn’t ask questions when they knew that to answer truthfully would be a betrayal. He had to tell her yes.

“I knew it.. That...that Vulcan”

The outburst seemed to be the end of that for, even as she shook her head, she started to smile a little. 

“Sometimes I just want to strangle that man,” she said, some of the anger coming back, “and then then I just want to...”

“Yes? You want to what?”

She turned to Spock with a light in her eyes that told him that she wasn’t angry any more.

“Just never you mind.” Her smile stretched out and opened. “All right, Mr Spock, if you ‘re going to stay and help, let’s get to it.”

He didn’t want to be there. His thoughts kept flying off to where Father was working on that climate control system. It wasn’t as automatically controlled as their own was and there were some assemblies in there that theirs didn’t have either. Father could describe it all to him and he could examine the manuals, but it wasn’t the same as having the system in front of him to work with. And Father knew all sorts of tricks you could use to put things back on line even if you didn’t have the right parts. Knowing how to do such things might come in handy some time in the future.

 

The visicom went off and Mother answered it, nudging the button with her elbow.

 

“Shor Kirpa doian,” she said like always and then paused. “Yes. I figured it was your doing.”

It was Father but she didn’t dial the video on. 

“Yes, I am. Yes, dear.” Her voice got soft, almost with tears. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. I know you are. Me, too. Well, I’d better let you get back to work. Okay. Bye-bye, dear.”

Mother keyed off and then came at Spock with her gooey chaktai-covered hands as if she were going to wipe them all over him. He jumped off his stool because you never could tell when Mother might do something irrational, especially when there were no other Vulcans around. Once, she had put half of an egg salad sandwich on Father’s face and only half by accident. Earth people sometimes had a temporary insanity they called ‘the giggles’.

 

Mother washed off her hands, laughing to herself. Spock climbed back on his stool and sat patiently, wanting to be with Father with his own hands covered in lubricant.

“You sure have been awfully quiet lately,” she said to him. At home, she wasn’t as particular about her English as she was at school. she used euphemisms that ticked and idiomatic expressions that intrigued and, when she had a rare loss of temper, words that made Father scold. Spock wasn’t allowed to use them but he knew that they were hell and damn. And then there was the one Sepek had said on Mother’s first day of school. She never said that one, but Ambassador Rosenberg did. Sometimes she said people’s names. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Jesus was the one whose birthday was Christmas and the reason you got presents. Mary and Joseph were his parents.

“My stomach was sick,” Spock told her. That was a good excuse for being quiet and he really had been nauseous.

“I know that.” She reached out and tapped his forehead. “You’ve been thinking too much.” Mother drew him over to the small sofa in the corner of the kitchen and sat cross-legged in it. Her stomach sort of sat in her lap. “It’s about the baby, isn’t it.”

She took both of his hands in hers so that he couldn’t get away. “Please tell me, Spock. Whatever it is, I’ll understand.” And she would. She always did.

Spock felt his head head nodding up and sown.

“I wonder what will happen if it’s not - if it’s a boy, I mean.”

“I knew that something was bothering you,” his mother told him. “And now I know what it is.”

How could she know? He was perfectly in line. Nothing could show. But she knew. He knew that she knew. She always knew.

“All this talk about the baby being a girl and being your father’s heir. You’re afraid that if we do have a girl that your father won’t have any time for you anymore.”

Mother’s eyes locked down on his and held him more securely than her hands did. You had to be very brave and very careful with Other or she would catch you.

“I would understand why it would be so,” he told her. “You don’t have to explain it to me. Sepek says that if Father has a girl, there would be lots of money and property and things from the High House for her.”

Mother made one of her faces then, not at him but at the air, or probably at Sepek. Sepek was not the schoolmate of his that Mother was most fond of.

“Dear...” The dictionary said that you pronounced that word as one syllable but Mother always made it into two. “Your father and I don’t need their money, and we certainly don’t want it.”

She had begun softly, but her voice was strained. “I’ll admit that there was a time when we could have used their money, and their support, but your father is a very well-paid official now, and I’m rather clever at investing. So there’s absolutely no reason that any of us has to bow to Taimun.”

There was anger in her voice and her hands tightened on his. Her eyes were focused on a space beyond Spock’s left ear.

 

“And as for the precious line - well, T’Pau can have it all for all I care and for all the happiness it will being her. And you remember this, Spock...it was your father who turned his back on Taimun, not the other way ‘round. If anyone’s to go begging for an alliance it’s them.”

“Now..” She pushed the sternness from her voice and gave him her Earth-sky yes. “I knoe your father’s been talking about his heir this and his heir that. Well, that’s just the way men talk, and in a few years you and your father will be doing the same thing and it will mean just as little.”

Mother dropped his hands and pushed his hair up in front. Then she straightened it again.

“Now you listen to me, young man,” she said if she were scolding him but he knew she wasn’t really, “when this baby is born, nobody is going to ignore you or love you less - oh, there goes that word again.”

It was supposed to be a good word, but somehow it always made Spock uneasy.

“Well, let’s just say that no one will care for you any less, whether it’s a girl or not.”

Was this true? He remembered Father letting Noiard help him even though she didn’t understand what he was doing, and how Father had praised the markes without actually saying anything about the taste, and she wasn’t even his heir.

“Oh, Spock...” Mother let out a little breath. “Did you know that there was a time when your father and I didn’t know that we could have children together because of the Terran and Vulcan factors? And then when you came along, you were just like a little miracle.”

She pressed her hands together with his inside them. “You know, Spock, your father was just in training for the diplomatic corps when you were born. With this house and all the medical expenses, and with no help from anyone, your father had to spend his off-days working at Sinse Laboratories to support the three of us. I couldn’t be of much help that way because I was taking care of you.” 

Mother’s eyes shifted from his as if she were remembering something.

“Oh, I was so proud of your father. He’d never struggled for anything in his life. The High House always put it in his hands. jAnd after all that happened, he never made me feel...”

She looked back at Spock. “Well, let’s just say that your father was never a whiner. And he had to work very hard to take care of us, Spock. He would come home from his training sessions or from Sinse, and all he really wanted to do was fall into bed. Some days he was too tired even to eat. But no matter how exhausted he was and how long the days were or how much studying he had to do he always - every night - he always had time to play with you.”

“What did he play with me?”

“Oh, nothing, really. You were too tiny at first to understand much. Usually he’d just sit there with you in his arms and talk to you so you’d know who he was and so you’d know the sound of his voice.”

Mother’s hands dropped to her lap and she seemed to be looking off someplace as if an invisible cloud had come down into the room and was showing her pictures of something he couldn’t see.

“I remember one time...it was one of his training days. Your father came home with a lot of reading and studying to do and there were reports that he had to write for the lab the next morning. So I left you with him and went off to see if dinner was ready, and when I came back your father was sprawled on his back on the sofa fast asleep , and you were curled up on his chest. And when you heard me coming, you woke up and you looked up at me and said, ‘sssshhhh, Mama. Dada night-night.’ Then you curled back up under his chin and went to sleep.”

 

Her voice sounded funny and she got up from the sofa.

“Mother are you crying?”

“Of course not,” she said, but she kept her back toward him.

“But your eyes...”

“Are very tired from having to read two whole lessons full of translations.” She drew her fingers over the tapes she had left on the side table where she’d been working while the uda was boiling. They were all in light blue casings with darker blue school emblems on them except for Sepek’s. He always used bright orange ones with their tribal badge on them in gold.

“Shall I help you, Mother?”

“No. No, dear. I’ve finished them,” she said, sweeping them into a case. “This can’t be much fun for you, watching me cook. I thought I heard the sounds of a roshvagor tami game getting up out in the court.”

“Yes, Mother.”

He really didn’t want to play roshvagor tami but he got up from the sofa and did what he was told. When he got outside, the wind was blowing in the trees in sharp little gust. No matter what she said, Mother had been crying; she had just told one of those ‘little white lies’ so that he wouldn’t think that she was upset, the same way she’d siad that it wouldn’t matter if her baby was a girl just so that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Spock didn’t play; he just watched the discs being tossed back and forth. He knew the names of all the people there, even the name of the harkai’s visiting cousin from the northern provinces, but he seldom talked with them. It was easier at school where being the English ser’s son made him popular in certain circles. Playing roshvagor tami was one of the things that he had wanted to teach Courtenay Jaquith.

He had thought that best once, a Terran sister to look to him and be friends to. He was beginning to realize now that any sister would steal his place, the same way any Vulcan baby might by being more logical or more in control of its emotions than he was. And now that he thought of it, a Terran boy would be no better. He’d be like Mother - laughing and touching and crawling into her lap the way Father’s brother used to do when he lived in shiKar. He was only a baby then, but a Terran brother could run to Mother even after his robing. Mother would like that. And worse, he’d be her heir, too.

Spock remembered what his father had said about Mother’s blood chemistry. It could get dangerous. He knew that much from listening to Aunt Dor-hu babble on. Babies didn’t always survive. That was bad. He didn’t want the baby to die. Maybe if it hadn’t been started at all, it really wouldn’t matter and nobody would care.

He wondered when they had started it. He knew how long it took a baby to grow. Father said that it would be born in I’Api; that meant that it had to have happened around the beginning of Yimsot. Maybe before Father was sick.

No, it was probably afterwards when Father was pleasanter and more cooperative with people. Father would have had to cooperate with Mother to make a baby. He would have had to let her have his seed. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that it would have to have been after Father got well because he couldn’t imagine him cooperating that way unless he was in remarkably high spirits.

Someone had sanded an opponent and cracked their disc in the process. They hadn’t tossed it so hard, it was just that the community set was so old and got so much use. Spock volunteered to bring out one of his family’s discs and went back into the house to get it.

He had gotten just to the archway to the back hallway when a fist of thought struck him simultaneously in the stomach and in the back of the head, driving the breath from his chest and the light from his mind. It wasn’t for a second or two that he heard the crash and the following clatter.

“Mother?” His legs unfroze and he ran to the kitchen. The step-stool had overturned on the floor and under it lay his mother. He went quickly to help her up and found her strangely still. He held a hand to her nose. His palm felt no heat of breath; her chest did not move. “Mother? Mother?”

o0o

Eleven Part Two

 

He watched as his hand pressed down on the soft spot where she had told him many times was the place where her heart was, but he couldn’t feel anything. He searched with both of his hands, pressing and groping, becoming more and more frightened by a shrill voice in his head: Mother! Mother!Mother!Mother!

Something moved under Spock’s hand, protesting. No! It isn’t right! Why was it moving when she lay still? No!No!No! Mother! Mother!

“It’s all right...it’s all right,” said a soothing, sleeping voice. “It’s all right now, baby. Mommy’s coming.”

The whole weight of his body shifted suddenly and there was a painful moan from beneath him. In that moment, the screaming voice stopped battering his mind. “Mother? Are you all right? Mother?”  
She tried to move again and cried out in a way that chilled him through. “Please, Mother,” he said, trying to calm her, trying to calm himself. “You mustn’t move.”

Her eyes were shiny and far-away looking and after many moments they finally focused. “Spock - “

She cried out again, but this time before she tried to move. Her hand went around his arm and squeezed until it hurt. It seemed to go on forever, this pain, then her face went smooth again and, when she opened her eyes, she let go of his arm.

“I’ll go call the ambulance, “ he said. His mother caught him by the hand and held him fast. “No. No, get your father.”

“But he’s three courts away. I’ll call the ambulance first and then while they’re on their way.”

“No!” Another pain. this one was so strong that Spock’s forehead started to throb. “Go get your father! Now!”

She began to squirm on the hard floor and Spock could not keep her still.

“Go straight to him! Don’t stop for anything!”

When he hesitated,her voice tore into a sob. “I need your father! Go now. Hurry!”

He waited no longer. He stumbled over the step-stool where it lay near the cabinets where he had shoved it to get to his mother. The hallways of his house were a blur in his eyes and he was at once on the street, running, his bare feet not touching the hot pavement long enough to feel its searing heat. 

Things streaked past him; the street was a long tunnel in his eyes with high walls made of plants and buildings and people who shook their heads at the sight of a boy tearing down a paved, vehicle byway like a maniac. His brain could not stop to think of what they were thinking or what they would say if they ever discovered who he was.

He was almost to the third court. But what if Father wasn’t there? What if he had gone off somewhere to borrow a tool or some small supplies from another house? How would he find him?

At the corner of the court was a young ariala tree. Cutting that corner sharply, Spock ducked under the low branches but he didn’t duck low enough to avoid the small branches that struck and scratched his face. Nor did he avoid collision with an immeasurably solid object.

He felt hands on his upper arms in a grip that was totally disciplinary. The voice, however, was calmly inquiring. “What do you mean by such display?”

Spock looked up into the stony face of his father through eyes that were watering from the sting of the ariala branches. “It’s Mother,” he breathed. “She’s fallen.”

There was a quick but polite leave-taking and his father disappeared. Although his chest was heaving and his lungs already painfully raw from his run, Spock turned and headed back the way he had come, never catching up his father until they had reached the house. 

“Where is she?” His father stood before a hall of open doors. “Where is she, Spock?”

There wasn’t enough air in the world for him to breathe and to talk as well. “In...in the kitchen.”

His father brushed past him without touching him and blew him back against the wall. When he reached the kitchen Spock found his father bending over his mother, trying to peer into her pain-closed eyes. His hands were moving over her body asking, “where is the pain?”

“The baby...oh, God, Sarek...the baby...”

Her voice caught in her throat as she writhed on the floor, her breathing making frightening sounds. father hushed her with soothing words and soothing hands, telling her not to concern herself, not to worry.

“The ambulance will be here in just a moment. Just lie still now.” Father turned to him now. “You did tell them that she was pregnant?”

Standing there in the doorway, Spock felt a hole open up behind him, a hole that seemed suddenly inviting and safe. “I...didn’t...”

“What?” It was a silly question. Father would have said it illogical to ask the same question twice.

“I .... didn’t call the ambulance, Father. Mother said to find you...”

The visicom was near the door and Spock felt the waves of flame and ice as his father made the call.

“I... wanted to call, Father,” he said while the frequencies were being modulated. “I was...going to but...”

Firmly, succinctly, his father gave the necessary information and then disconnected the frequency. He paused for only a moment before he returned ot Mother. “Your excuses will be immortal if your inaction has killed your mother or our child.”

“Sarek. Please!”

“Leave,” Father told him with guarded tones. “Leave before you do any further damage.”

 

He went then to Mother as she lay twisting on the floor.

“Please, Sarek! Please!”

“Shush...” He removed his work apron and folded it under her head. Carefully, he untangled her long hair from under her back and spread it out behind her. He knelt beside her, smoothing her face with one hand, her abdomen with the other. “It will be all right now, everything will be well.”

“I told him...”

“Shush Amanda. Quiet now.” He pressed his fingers to her lips to quiet her, but this only made her more anxious to speak. “What is it then, my wife?”

“Spock... I told him not to call the ambulance!”

“What are you saying?”

“I told Spock not to call the ambulance!”

“Why?” His right hand framed her face.

“I wanted him to go to you!” Her hand fluttered across his hand where it lay on her belly and he gripped it. “I didn’t want him here.... I didn’t want him to be with me when it happened.”

o0o

he fled. In his room there was a big wardrobe and he hid inside it when the medical team came. He had never seen his mother sick before or injured more than a scratch. Father would get fevers from time to time, little ones or the bad one he’d had back in Yimsot, but Mother was always healthy. Father had said that it was because she couldn’t catch most Vulcan germs and that most of the Terran people she knew were isolated from their own kind and so didn’t carry any new germs to her. Mother didn’t fight back pain the way Vulcans did either. she’d cry out if she were pinched or if her foot was stepped on.

This was not a pinch or a misstepped foot. Even in the hallway, Spock had been able to feel the pain came at him like a fist. Nobody had ever reached at him like that before. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Unless someone was drying. They said it could happen like that when someone was dying.

He squeezed farther back into the wardrobe. He was in hiding. He had aroused his father’s displeasure many times - by neglecting his schoolwork, by fighting with other children, for leaving his belongings strewn about the house, for breaking things in the house because he was careless and, most of all, for hurting Mother. Hurting Mother’s feelings. What would Father do to him for endangering her life?

He was a coward and he didn’t care. He would hide so far back in the wardrobe, pull himself in so tight, that he would collapse on himself, a tiny back hole with an event horizon so small that no one would even know he was there. But unlike a black hole, he could close himself off so firmly, so cleverly, that on one else would be drawn into him no matter how close they came. No one. No one...no one...no one....

“Come out.” He felt hands on him. “Come out, Spock.”

The hands closed on his body and he began to move. “Come here, son.”

He was close to something but he wanted to be away. A warm, spicy smell batted at his nostrils and threatened to close in around him. He heard water running form somewhere and then felt something warm and wet press his forehead. He had not been crying. Why did he need a wet cloth?

“Here is a cold cloth for yur face. You are feverish.”

It wasn’t cold at all, but warm on his face. When he wouldn’t take it, someone wiped his face with it. From somewhere in the dark, he heard a voice.

“I felt nothing. I was so far away.”

“He’s absorbed it. You’d better hold him.”

A woman’s voice. Mother?

Something bit him in the back of his neck and for a moment, the world was gone.

“Spock. Can you hear me?” It was Father. He could see him now. the hands came again and he found himself sitting. “Spock...son - ?”

They were sitting sideways, sort of toward each other. Father’s left knee touched his right one. There was no one else in the room. “We must talk.”

That’s what he said, but for a while he didn’t speak at all. Spock felt too tired to think. If Father would only get up and go away he could curl up on his bed and fall asleep. He felt as if he had been stretched out over the sharp edge of a block of ice and his brain had been pulled from his body.

“Your mother is resting. The benor is with her.”

The benor? But the benor brought babies. Mother didn’t need her yet. “Is the baby born?”

Father drew a big breath and held it until it seemed it must be hurtful.

“There is no baby.”

“But...”

“It was born too soon. It was too weak to survive.” He felt Father’s eyes. “Son, are you attending to me?”

“I didn’t want the baby to die,” he said, knowing that he had wanted it dead if it meant that Mother had to die instead. He tried to imagine what it looked like - was it still in the house? Or had they carried it out in a jar like a preserved specimen?”

“No decent person would wish a child dead,” Father was saying.

He had. He hadn’t wanted any baby to share his room or his things or his parents. He started to slide away but Father’s hand closed on his wrist. “You are not to blame yourself my son.”

My son was for when he had done something to be proud of. Mother had nearly died, and her baby had.

“Look at me.” Spock forced himself to look up. His father’s eyes were big and shiny. There were tiny cracks around the outsides of them that he had never noticed before. “The baby’s death is not your fault. Accidents happen. There is nothing you could have done.”

“But I left Mother alone. I should have been there to geth the grater dwon.”

“No, Spock. Women are not our children that we must care for, as much as we men would like to think that we are so needed. I was wrong to send you to stand guard over your mother and to be responsible.” He was quiet for a full minute before he finished. “I was made to see that.”

“But if Mother hadn’t fallen, the baby wouldn’t have died.”

He hurt. He hurt so badly his teeth were aching. His brain was coming back and he wished it wasn’t. Father touched him lightly at the back of his neck until he winced, then took hold of him by the shoulders rubbing his thumbs back and forth along his clavicles.

“Something you must understand, my son, is that not all babies that are conceived are born and grow as you have. Some fail. There is something wrong in their genetic material or the mother’s body is not truly equipped at that time to bear. There are hundreds of things which can go awry. And when that happens, the woman’s body knows this and pushes the fetus out before it can draw too much of her strength or pull her down with it. It is said that there is ‘ a wisdom in the house of life,” and that is what is meant.”

“It wasn’t my fault?”

“No. And you were right to come for me when you did. Your mother needed me more than she needed the doctors. I could do more for her than they.”

It was just as if the air pressure had changed and his lungs had loosened. It wasn’t his fault. Father wouldn’t tell a little white lie to make things easier for him the way Mother would. It was the truth.

“Father?” His hand was inside Father’s hand, almost the way Mother’s often was. He was afraid to say something to make Father let go.

“Yes, Spock?”

“Was it your heir that died?”

Father didn’t answer for a moment although his hand tightened. “No. No, the fetus was male.”

“Is he still here?”

“Whom do you mean, son?”

“The baby?”

Father’s eyes were big on him. “No. It was taken away.”

In his mind, he saw himself, only tiny, bobbing up and down in a plastic beaker filled with preservative. would they take his brother away to Sinse and cut him apart to discover how a half-breed could live? Sometimes when he went down to the laboratory with FAther, he felt as if all of the morsm were looking at him and figuring how he would appear in a microscope beam. “When will we stand for him?”

“There will be no standing.” Father almost got up from the bed but Spock could tell that he was making himself stay. “One does not mourn for a fetus. It is a parasite and remains so under the law. Tradition does not provide that a household stand grief for one that does not exist on its own.”

He had more questions, but Father was too quiet for him to ask them. When he finally said something, his voice was nearly as quiet as silence. Somebody toned on the visicom.

Spock watched as his father got up to answer it. It was Grandfather. He wanted to know what time he and the others should arrive for dinner. Father had to tell them why they couldn’t come.

“How is Amanda?”

“Bruised only. There was no permanent damage.”

“Perhaps I should send one of the girls?”

“Not tonight.” Father was firm. “She is being extremely logical in accepting what happened. Still, it is best that I see to her alone.”

“Perhaps you should send Spock to me for a few days to keep him out from underfoot.”

When FAther looked back at him, Spock was on his feet, shaking his head vigorously. He did not want to be packed off like a baby to Grandfather’s to be taken care of. He could help Father take care of Mother.

Father turned back to the visicom. “Spock will not be underfoot. I will need him here. He could be a great help to me at this time.”

Someone was knocking at the door. “T’yetma?”

They stood in the hall and talked, the benor and Father. The back of Spock’s skull was throbbing. 

“It is not as if a fetus has failed. To your wife, a child has died.” The benor handed Father a slip of plastiform. “I want you to see this man. He will give you something. This must never happen again.”

Spock found a bandage on the back of his neck. How did that get there?

Father came back to the bed but he did not gesture for Spock to sit down. “Son, I need you to do something for me.”

“Yes, Father.”

“I want you to sit with your mother while I see to a few matters of importance.”

“But... what will I say to her?”

“There is little you need say, my son. Your presence at this time will be all the comfort she needs. You are the only child she has now.”

Spock followed his father out of the room and through the hallway until they came to a stop outside the room where Mother lay. “Wait here.”

Father went in alone and Spock could hear him talking to Mother. He seemed to have been waiting half--besa, before Father came out and beckoned him to go in.

“She has been given a sedative, Spock, so do not tire her. When she falls asleep, come and find me.” He started to reach for the door and felt Father’s hand on his shoulder. “Spock, if your mother should wish to... embrace you... you are not to refuse her. do you understand?”

Father’s face was nearly as tired as his voice was. Father never showed what he was thinking to anyone but Mother. And to me. This time, he’s showing it to me.

o0o

She hadn’t been crying. Her eyes weren’t red. She was brave. Father said she was brave and strong even though she didn’t seem it sometimes. There were things she had faced, he said, that would have crushed another. Fater said that he had some ofhis mother’s bravery. He didn’t feel like it just now.

“I’m sorry, Spock,” she said to him. “I’m so sorry.”

Why was she sorry? He was the one who had left her on the floor with the baby dying. Did it die first when it was still inside her, he wondered, or did it die when it came out? She had hold of his hand and said it again. 

“I’m so sorry, Spock. I wanted so much to give you a little sister- someone you could be with and share things with so that you wouldn’t feel so alone.”

It wasn’t her fault. Father had said that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. He wanted to tellher that but for some reason he couldn’t.

“Father said it was a boy.”

Mother nodded, patting his hand as if it were a tiny animal that needed to be comforted. “I know, dear. I know.”

Mother kept patting his hand but it began to feel as if it were to comfort herself and not him. He asked her if she wanted him to get her anything. She shook her head, no. “Spock...”

“Yes, Mother?”

“I know that you had mixed feelings about this baby, but that’s normal. Did you know that? And it’s all right to feel that way. Do you understand?”

How did she know? Every time she knew. Mixed feelings. His feelings were always mixed.

“Even so, I know you had your heart set on a little sister. But you wouldn’t have minded so terribly if it had been a boy, would you?”

“No, Mother,” he said. “It would be the same. It would still be your baby.”

Her hand stopped patting his for a moment and then tightened over his.

“Please, Mother. Don’t cry.”

“Your father said that...he said that same thing...”

she was going to cry. He could feel it about to start. The knot in his chest contracted and made him cry out. “Please, don’t cry, Mother. I’m sorry the baby died. “

And he was like a baby again because she was holding him.

“No...no...” She was a wind in his ears, the only sound he could hear. “You’re my baby, Spock... you’re my baby...”

 

o0o

 

The ambassador closed the door to the bedroom he and his wife shared and stood waiting for the sounds of the medical team leaving, of the gossiping voices of the people in the court. someone had mercifully cleaned up the kitchen, setting the furniture right and mopping the floor. When finally he felt the last traces of the House of Life depart the darkening halls, he strode with a purpose to the guest bedroom and threw open the door.

He took it all; the clothes, the blankets, the play-things, the new sling, even Spock’s beautiful gift still wrapped in its janisn, and carried them down to the cellar. There, in the shipping crates that had brought Amanda’s precious belongings from Earth - her bed, her chiming clock that was a non sequitur here, her mother’s dressing table and tea service - he packed everything that had been bought for their never-born child and those few things of Spock’s infancy they still owned, and quickly, without emotion, forced them into a dark corner out of the way. At the top of the stairs he turned off the light and shut the door. The child was dead, and he had buried it.

He walked slowly to the study. The halls were quiet now and sombre as if in missing a voice that they had never heard. The door to the room where they kept their books and documents stood open. It was into this room that the ambassador retreated.

He approached his desk, feeling the friction of air at his passage rasping and rough along his forehead. He touched the old wood and it, too, was coarse to his fingers in spite of many years of wear and use. At the corner was a scratch that had been made when it had been brought from his mother’s house nearly twelve years ago. No event occurred that some scar was not left behind which would not be covered nor smoothed away. He saw that now. How many times had Amanda said that an individual is the sum of her experiences, and why was it only now that he realized how true her words were?

The papers lay on his desk, his copies of the documents that he had signed before the medical team left. Odd, that they had been printed on paper. Most agencies had begun the use of plastiform for their hard copies.

He picked them up, held them in his hand for a moment before he put them down to remove from his bottom drawer the chest which he kept there. He unlocked it and threw back the lid, but before e placed the new documents within, he opened his top drawer and removed another form, the standard filiation papers that he had hoped to sign in only a few short weeks. Perhaps it had been wrong to tempt the gods so, to assume that he would be so favored.

Amanda. She could have been pared this had she been woman enough to exercise her privilege when she had discovered what her tenderness to him in Yimsot had caused. he had tried not to sway her, but she knew too well his thoughts and the dream he kept hidden. When the end of it had come, he had tried to say all the comforting things he felt in his heart, but when a woman's giving of life was begun with the giving of love, words were weak things, insipid and useless.

The paper was laid beside the others, then he lowered the lid of the chest. Although he knew that Amanda would never invade his privacy, he securely locked it and put it away. It had been easier for her knowing that the child she had lost had been male. It was the first time that he had ever lied to his wife.

 

o0o

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

91


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